


Letters from Capgras

by thebeespatella



Category: Adam (2009), Charlie Countryman (2013), Hannibal (TV), Hannibal Extended Universe - Fandom
Genre: After the Fall, Alternate Universe, Anal Fingering, Angst and Feels, Blood and Injury, Cannibalistic Thoughts, Canon-Typical Violence, M/M, Masturbation, Non-Consensual Voyeurism, Overuse and Abuse of Dante (not sorry), Parallel Universes, Sexuality Crisis, Trauma
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-12-15
Updated: 2016-07-28
Packaged: 2018-05-06 21:19:21
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 23,410
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5431097
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thebeespatella/pseuds/thebeespatella
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>But—as his hands and legs lose feeling, as his face pressed against Hannibal’s chest numbs until he can feel nothing at all in the cold black—</i>I wish I could have seen his face,<i> Will thinks, </i>once last time. <i>His mind burns with yearning, and those are his last words before he fades.</i></p><p>Will decides to stay with Hannibal. Instead, he gets Nigel.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Denial

**Author's Note:**

> You can also find me at the-bees-patella on tumblr! 
> 
> Please check out this amazing artwork by [granpappy-winchester](http://www.granpappy-winchester.tumblr.com) [here](http://granpappy-winchester.tumblr.com/post/152483045746/for-em-c-writes-and-the-fanfiction-letters-from).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to [hannihumor](http://archiveofourown.org/users/hannihumor) for listening to my ramblings. And, as always, [em-c-writes](http://archiveofourown.org/users/em_c_writes/pseuds/em_c_writes) for being supportive and wonderful.

“I did not die—I was not living either!

Try to imagine, if you can imagine,

me there, deprived of life and death at once.”

\- Dante, “The Inferno”, Canto XXXIV

&

              They’re falling, falling, plunging into the deep abyss of the ocean. Everything is ink dark, and frigid cold, the sharp shock impact slamming all the air out of his lungs.

              He knows it is right. He knows it is good. Kill yourself, save them all. But—as his hands and legs lose feeling, as his face pressed against Hannibal’s chest numbs until he can feel nothing at all in the cold black— _I wish I could have seen his face,_ Will thinks,  _once last time_. His mind burns with yearning, and those are his last words before he fades.

&

              He opens his eyes, which is the first surprise. He is no longer wet and cold but he can feel the sting of his cut against his cheek, blood still coppery and garish in his mouth. His shoulder throbs with the stab wound there. Taking in the space around him, he sees a simple dining table, a clean kitchen, and bookshelves neatly pushed against every available wall. It’s day—light coming through the bright, clean windows, filling the high ceilings. Most of all, it is quiet, even though he can still feel the thudding of battering currents in his ears. It is nowhere he’s seen before, the sounds and smells unfamiliar, the sun is shining, and panic seizes him, the old ache of losing time—

              “Where the fuck are you, darling?”

              Will’s head snaps toward the hallway, where the low, familiar voice had come from. ‘Fuck’? ‘Darling’? _Hannibal?_  Ants walk on his skin as he hears footsteps shuffle in the hallway—dragging, sloped sounds, nothing like Hannibal’s crisp footfall.

              A man emerges from the hallway, and Will almost stops breathing.

              It is Hannibal, albeit wearing less then Will has ever seen, shorts across his hips, and there is an ugly black tattoo across his neck. Will can’t speak accurately to some details—the rough hair across his chest, the long scar across the ribs, the curve of powerful thighs and the sizable erection tenting the worn boxers. He quickly looks away from it, eyes returning to again to the man’s face. The same slanted angles to his face, hair impatiently pushed back in a way Hannibal would never abide, but the same silvering color. The same jut of his chin, and those same eyes that properly belonged on a shark but not a person. The powerful cords of muscle in his shoulders and arms, long, elegant fingers.

              In everything but dress and manner, this man is exactly Hannibal Lecter.

              Will has seen stranger things, but this ranks pretty high. He watches in fascination as this man, who wears Hannibal’s body but has dressed down for the occasion, narrows his eyes, clenches his jaw. The air spikes with fear and tension. Will studies the arm—the one that had pulled him close after slicing him open and closer still as they fell—it lifts to the closest bookshelf, and steps back when it comes back with a gun. It’s a small caliber automatic, clearly well maintained, and it’s pointed directly at him.

              “Who the fuck are you, and where the fuck is Adam?” Not-Hannibal’s voice is actually a little rougher, the way the accent rounds out the words off by a shade.

              “My name is Will Graham,” Will says—another echo of encephalitis. “I—I have no idea where I am, or who Adam is.”

              “Is that so, Will Graham.” Not-Hannibal advances slowly, with the same prowl and crowding of Will’s space, until they are not more than a foot apart. The gun is steady as it presses against his forehead. Will smells smoke, cheap whisky, gunpowder. “Is that fucking so.”

              “It’s definitely fucking so,” Will says flatly. He is tired and bloody and confused. His spine still tingles—as though his vertebrae are harpsichord keys under Bach’s composing fingers. He stares at some point past Not-Hannibal’s shoulder, avoiding his eyes.

              There is a moment of stillness. Will feels himself uncomfortably assessed and scrutinized, like he is being stripped, ignoring the twist in his throat through sheer force of habit. He breathes evenly, continues to look away— He watches Not-Hannibal watch him. A dirty pigeon swoops its way across a windowpane. There is the soft noise of traffic, the rattle of a cart outside.

              Suddenly, Not-Hannibal grabs his jaw, nails pressing, searing into the hole in his cheek, the iron taste of blood filling his teeth, and Will feels himself react, pushing one hand against the outside of Not-Hannibal’s elbow, draws the other back, ready to strike wherever convenient. Fresh blood trickles from his shoulder. The barrel of the gun is hard and cold against his face. Not-Hannibal lets go, and, with the gun still pressing into Will’s body, does a quick but thorough pat-down for weapons. Will tries to stay still but flinches when a palm drags across his stomach, across the scar.  

              Not-Hannibal huffs a soft laugh, standing straight again. “Twitchy little shit, aren’t you?” He takes Will’s face in his hand again, digging his fingers cruelly into the burning cut on Will’s cheek once more, and then throws Will away from him, turns around and stalks back into the living room. Click of a lighter, a curl of smoke. “Well. At least I can fucking smoke inside.” He’s holding the gun loose at his side; it’s like another unnatural finger on his hand.

              Will’s hands arpeggio in and out of fists. “I would also prefer if you didn’t smoke inside,” he says. Not-Hannibal spins around, and seeing Hannibal’s face with a lit cigarette hanging out of his lush mouth is almost alluring in its lack of propriety. “I used to work in law enforcement. Smoking inside is a serious fire hazard.”

              Another curl of smoke, a laugh that is choked with ash. “Clever, too, then.” He grabs something else off the bookshelf, walks back to Will, and Will braces himself again—but all Not-Hannibal has in his hand is a phone. He taps on it absently, and then puts the screen in Will’s face. “Do you see the problem here, Will Graham?”

              Will’s eyes take a moment to adjust to the bright screen. It’s a picture of a young man laying on his stomach on a bed, entirely clean-shaven, a sheet draped just below his hips, the suggestive curve obscene. Will takes in the soft smile, the sweaty curls plastered to the man’s forehead, the livid bruises on his neck and back and the beginning of the swell of his ass. The heat of a flush across his cheeks and tingeing his back.

               He looks exactly like Will. Well, what Will would have looked like fifteen years ago, if he bothered to shave, and if he hadn’t gotten stabbed about four times too many. He meets Not-Hannibal’s eyes for the first time.

              “Yes,” he says, and Not-Hannibal tosses the phone onto the dining table. “I—” He pauses. Where was he going to go with this? ‘I was injured while fighting a serial killer (not the first one in my life; the second) and then I threw myself off a cliff with someone who looks just like you, because—‘

              Because—

              Because I—

              I loved—

              Because I have tasted the sin of parting flesh and reveled in it. I watched Hannibal rip out the Red Dragon’s throat with his teeth and I wanted nothing more than to share the morsel, the spoils of our kill. We stood, drenched in black in the moonlight and I burned with a thrumming desire that lit up my heart and inflamed my soul.

              His diaphragm seizes in a way that he prefers only to happen when he’s alone, and he closes his eyes. In Not-Hannibal’s place, there is the stag, dark and terrible with voids for eyes, and the stench of death rising all around him. It flickers, and then it’s Abigail, smiling at him with white eyes and blood gushing from her neck. Flicker. It’s Garret Jacob Hobbs, laughing, and Will can see every single one of his teeth. Flicker. It’s Dolarhyde with a great chunk of flesh missing from his throat, the outline of Hannibal’s teeth fresh against his trachea, and the wound grows and grows until again Will is swallowed by darkness and pressed against the stag, suffocating in cold water, but this time he’s alone—

              “Graham. Hey. Fucking—Will. What the fuck—”

              An icy fist has his lungs in a vice grip, and he feels light-headed, as though all the blood had been flushed from his body. It might as well have been, between Hannibal and Jack. Every time he blinks he sees Dolarhyde’s gut part cleanly under his knife. Every muscle in his body is rigid and unyielding.

              “I’m should have—I don’t know why—I—”

              “Will, you have to fucking breathe, go on. Easy, slow. I don’t know what the fuck is going on, but we’ll sort it later—Will, stop, what the fuck are you—don’t—”

              He feels a sharp hand on his wrist, and blinks. His fingers are covered in blood, and his hands are shaking violently. He wants to breathe but his lungs are filled with ocean. The air feels thin and he is gasping. “What—did I—”

              “Hush for a minute, try to breathe.” There’s first a heavy arm around his shoulders, then a hand pressing lightly against his unbloodied cheek, gentling him down to sit on a hardwood floor. It’s freezing. He shivers violently once, and then finds that his nerves can’t stop dancing. They’re Myrtha’s companions, they’re going to dance him to his grave. The hand guides him into the curve of a shoulder, and he draws his knees up to try absorb the warmth he finds there. One arm tightens around his shoulders, the other curls around his shaking, bloody hand to clasp his fingers and rub small circles against the bony joint in his wrist. The air is so sparse he can glean nothing from it.

              From a thousand miles away—a low voice, humming with familiar notes. “Will. Can you hear me? Squeeze my fingers if you can.”

              It’s weak, but he manages.

              “Good. Perfect. Now, listen. My name is Nigel. You’re in New York City, in the West Village. We’re on the second floor.”

              Will jerks his head once, biting his lip to try stop the trembling, but he can’t, he can’t, he can’t—

              “It’s my—”

              He finds himself with a feeling like vertigo when he is swept up in Nigel’s arms, pushed sharply out of the blood-smeared visions back into his body. He feels the shifting up-down of walking, and then he is laid onto a bed. His face won’t stop bleeding, and he can see the bright red blood spreading across cream sheets, running a mile a minute in ugly splotches. A dip in the bed behind him, and then a rumbling sigh in his ears.

              “Close your eyes, Will. Stop looking at that.”

              Will manages to close his eyes, curls up back into himself. It’s still cold.

              “I need you to fucking tell me what you fucking need, Will. Will”— Nigel puts one broad hand between Will’s—“here. Squeeze if you understand.”

_Yes._

              “And if anything—if you need—just fucking squeeze, all right?”

_Yes._

              Audible relief. “Fucking right.” Slowly, Nigel pulls Will’s body close to his own, wrapping him tightly in his arms, tilting so that Will bears the brunt of his weight. It’s warmer now.

              “See? It’s going to be all right, darling.” Will tries to nod, but it’s just a shutter-speed spasm of a thing.  “Sorry about the gun. I—can’t—just, Adam,” Nigel continues. “I mean, you very fucking clearly have some fucking issues, but Adam is—Adam has something called Asperger’s Syndrome. His brain—fucking works differently—”

              Will interrupts him with another sharp, uncertain nod. “Studied—psychology—” he stutters.

              “So you know why I’m worried about where the fuck he is, because you’re fucking here instead. He needs to eat, and sleep, and it’s all on a schedule, and just—fucking alone—”

              Nigel is heavy, and Will pushes back more deeply into the weight. The air is more substantial now; he feels it start to fill his lungs. “T-tell me—about—”

              He feels Nigel smile against his ear. “Adam? Christ.” Will squeezes his fingers and doesn’t let go. “All right. He fucking loves outer space—planets, stars. He works for a space exploration company now; used to work for a toy store or some shit, but the fucking assholes fired him. He was making shit they didn’t understand. But now he gets to mess about with his fucking—models, and star charts, and he has a fucking replica of some famous astronaut’s space suit in our closet. It takes up a shitload of space.”

              He pauses to draw a breath. His voice is even and deep and, despite the curses dropped like commas, even refined, the accent in the same taxonomy as Hannibal’s. Will feels his spine beginning to uncoil and thaw, and squeezes Nigel’s fingers again.

              “Sometimes he stops himself while he’s talking, because people told him he talks too much. If I could get my hands on those motherfuckers—anyway, when he’s interested in something, he’ll learn all the fuck about it, talk about it all the fucking time. Last year, it was snails for a month, and shit was fucking disgusting. He tried to make me watch a—a  _video_  of two slugs fucking, and I have seen some sick shit but it was just fucking—slimy.”

              Will’s mind settles, seeing vague inky images of the sky and snails curling around each other against the back of his eyelids. His body is still shaking, but less like a wave than a ripple.

              “His latest—he’s been trying to get us a dog, but I don’t—it’s going to piss fucking everywhere, and Adam will get stressed, but if we walk anywhere it’s all, fucking—‘Look at that one, Nigel’, ‘What about that dog, Nigel?’, ‘Animal shelters are awful places, Nigel, we have to save a puppy.’ I know—I swear on the blessed Virgin’s tits, I know he is going to fucking hate it, the dog is going to fuck up the schedule, and want things that make no fucking sense, and he won’t be able to reason with it, and then I—fucking _I_ —will have to pick up the dog shit and walk it at the fucking ass-crack of dawn—”

              Will finds he can clear his throat around the fist in it and says, “I had seven dogs.”

              “Seven fucking _—_ Will, what in the fuck is wrong with you?”

              Will can feel the muscles in his face smile, and it hurts. “A lot.”

              “Where did you even—where the fuck did you keep them?”

              “I had a house,” Will says, and opens that door in his mind, stepping into snow-soaked boots, the little house with the lights on in the middle of the pitch-tar dark. His haven, his home, smelling of forest and frost. “Way outside the city. Wolf Trap, Virginia.

              “I could—they got enough exercise and I lived alone.”

              Nigel grunts. “Seven. Like a fucking cat lady. You would die and they’d fucking eat you before anybody noticed.”

              It’s too much, and what starts as an exceedingly painful smile turns into full-blown laughter like he hasn’t had since he met Molly. His entire body shakes and aches with it. “Dogs don’t care if it’s human meat,” Will agrees, after he settles a little. “But—rescue dogs can be difficult. All of mine were strays, and I have the scars to prove it.”

              Nigel makes a quiet noise of acknowledgement, and shifts over, relieving Will of some of his weight. Click, fire, smoke, ash.

              “Sometimes they’ve been abused. Sometimes they’re just scared. Sometimes they’re angry. Sometimes all three. They’ve always been abandoned.” The slightest tremor flits through Will’s hand like a parting wave, and his lungs feel more comfortable now sitting in his chest. He opens his eyes to see blood still blossoming across the pillow, but it doesn’t move him. “My first dog was a stray. I was thirteen. It always hung out in the neighborhood, and I would save the crusts from my sandwiches at lunch and feed him.” Nigel rolls away from him some more, and Will turns to lie on his back. The ceiling is high and white. “My dad—it was the closest he ever came to hitting me when he found out. I was wasting food, and it could have bit me. But I knew it was safe. They were both just afraid.”

              He shifts his eyes up and Nigel is looking at him, openly curious and contemplative. His cigarette still burns, forgotten between his fingers. “Your father never hit you.”

              Will frowns and looks back at the ceiling. “No, he didn’t. Is that what you got out of this story?”

              “I don’t fucking know. I’m not your fucking therapist.”

              Will’s lips twitch. “What are you?” he asks.

              “You used to work for law enforcement.”

              “New Orleans PD, then the FBI.”

              “And now?”

              “Now,” Will says, maintaining as much eye contact as he can. “I’m pretty sure I’m out of a job.”

              Nigel just keeps looking at him. “I work in security,” he says finally.

              If only he knew how incautious he could be around Will, how whatever “security” meant was probably not even close to what Will had touched with his bare hands.

              “Did you want a”—Nigel gestures with his cigarette at Will’s general countenance—“you should have a bath.”

              “Yeah.” He lets out a deep breath. The water would be hot and he would be clean. He goes to stand, and everything hurts, but he turns back to meet Nigel’s eyes. “You—thank you.”

              A one-shouldered shrug. “Adam—panics sometimes. Besides,” he says, and Will is nearly blinded by that clear, unsubtle smile on what should be Hannibal’s face, “you should know. Dogs and fucking thunder jackets, that sort of shit.”

              “Yeah. Yeah.” Will grimaces at the bloodstains on the bed, and walks to the bathroom. It’s quiet and still, and he makes quick work of his pants, but his shirt is a different issue entirely. He’s unpeeling the fabric from where it had dried and stuck to his shoulder, blood like cement, when there’s a knock on the door.

              “You're probably Adam's size, too. I’m leaving clothes out here.” A soft  _fwump_  outside the door, and pad, pad, pad away.

              Will avoids the mirror and fiddles with the shower, leaving the shirt on. The water will help. He gets it warm and steps in carefully under the spray. He closes his eyes to let the water run over his face, soak through his hair, add weight as it waterlogs his shirt. The repetitive drumming of the water feels good, a normal sound, gentle and continuous, and he just stands there for a while. It won’t get everything, but it feels cleansing, and that’s enough for now.

              There is soap and shampoo laid out evenly on the other side of the shower, so Will scrubs himself down vigorously—the water is running dirt-brown into the drain. When he tilts his head, he can feel the water drumming into his face, trickling through his cheek.

              He quickly turns his head back down.

              There is a light yellow towel on the rail, so he steps out and takes it, vigorously drying himself and avoiding his wounds. When he peeks outside the door, there is neatly folded underwear, trousers, and socks. He slips them on in the bathroom and frowns. There is no shirt. Through the haze of the fog, he can barely discern his reflection. He looks—well, frankly, he looks dead. Paler than usual, with deep triangles of shadows under his eyes and in the hollows beneath his cheekbones. The wound in his face is still open and bright. He will always have blood on his face; his shoulder is faring no better.

              But the pain is far away, almost as though it’s happening to a voodoo doll in some green gloomy grotto of a world. Instead, what he feels most acutely (and he supposes he always has) is that well-worn ache, that heavy stone knife deep in his stomach. But it’s no longer broken-in and comfortable—now, washed with sea salt, it’s taking up more space, sharper—like a gunshot wound to the side, phantom bruises. It’s the loss of the cold layer of Hannibal’s skin over his own, and suddenly he’s far too warm. He tries to swallow, but it’s two sheets of sandpaper sliding together, and the world screams—he drops to his knees and throws up into the toilet. The nausea comes in a firm lurch up and over again, hand over fist, and even though his stomach is empty, he can’t stop retching. His knuckles are white with the shaking sweating grip he has on the toilet seat.

              Finally, he sits back on his heels and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. His cheek burns with bile and acid. He stands up unevenly, and stares at the mess floating on the water, swirling down as he flushes the toilet. The queasiness and the way the muscles of his stomach sigh with the effort are the first tethers to this strange reality. Everything else—blood, visions, fever—were holdovers from the world of fear and Baltimore.

              Will is used to the floor pulling out from under him, but it is a different thing entirely for the sky to do the same.

              He walks out into the kitchen, where Nigel is sitting at the kitchen table with a bag and a folded button-down shirt on the table. He nods his head to indicate that Will should sit. If he’d heard Will throwing up in the bathroom, he doesn’t say anything.

              Out of the bag comes a bottle of vodka, a roll of bandage, gauze, a needle and thread. The needle is not curved, as it should be for this purpose, but thin, small, and straight.

              “Shoulder first,” Nigel grunts, and Will scoots his chair forward. Nigel pours the vodka over the wound, stopping the stream with a small towel pressed on Will’s ribs. He misses some of it and it trickles coldly down Will's stomach. “Now relax,” Nigel says, roughly adjusting Will’s posture against the chair. He flicks a lighter open to hold the needlepoint in the blue flame, then he threads the needle with steady hands. Will is suddenly struck by a vivid image of Hannibal in the back of an ambulance, elbow-deep in another man’s abdominal cavity, trying to save his life.

              “Why are you doing this?” he says. His voice is hoarse with acrid bile, and he leans into the pain.

              “Neither of us know what the fuck is going on,” Nigel says, with a small shrug. He’s put on a shirt. It’s light blue, covered in a print of dachshunds. Will feels a flush of embarrassment at the idea that it might be for him, but is distracted and tenses at the first push of the needle. “Sorry,” says Nigel.

              Will adjusts to the even stabbing, the odd feeling of thread through flesh. “I think I know where Adam is.”

              Nigel’s hands stay steady, even as Will sees the tension rattle through him. “I think he’s in the Chesapeake Bay, just off the coast of Maryland.”

              This time, Nigel’s hands jerk roughly on his skin. “What the fuck?” Will shrugs—“Don’t fucking move”—and looks at his shoulder instead of at Nigel.

              “It’s where I was,” he says. “With someone who has your face.”

              “Someone with my fucking what?” He’s still holding the needle and thread, and Will wishes he weren’t.

              “I—I look just like Adam. I woke up here, where he probably was. Before that, I was in the Bay.”

              “What, fucking fishing?”

              Will blinks at him. The cold threatens to steal over his diaphragm again, but he focuses. “No. I threw us both off a cliff into the water.”

              “You fucking what?” Nigel’s voice is low again, humming with danger.

              “There were…extenuating circumstances.”

              Nigel drops the needle on the table to stand up, walk away from him again. The thread is dangling loose from his bare shoulder. If Nigel gets the gun again, at least there will be certainty. But he just lights another cigarette, and Will flinches at the ash flaking to the floor. After walking the circle of the room a few times, decidedly not looking at Will, he slams his body back into the chair. “What the fuck,” he growls, smoke pluming exuberantly out on the expletive, “kind of extenuating fucking circumstances lead you to jump off a fucking cliff with your husband?”

              “He’s not my—” Will pauses. How had he missed the lighter band of skin around Nigel’s finger, in contrast to the rest of his hand? Too busy panicking about his own nightmare failed suicide, probably. “We’re not legally married. It’s a long story.”

              “I fucking gathered.”

              Will stops for another second. Then, “If I’m alive, then Han—the version of you that exists in my world is very likely also alive. And if so—Adam will certainly be alive.”  _I don’t know for how long._  “He loves me, if that helps.”

Nigel hums out another cigarette breath. He looks intently at the needle.

              “I was running away,” Will says into the cloud. “I was exhilarated and afraid. I didn’t know what to do with him. With myself.”

              Nigel picks up the needle again. “Just do it fucking properly,” he mumbles around the cigarette. “Fucking go to fucking Italy, drink good wine. Fucking cook together, I don’t know.”

              “I tried most of that. Italy. A lot of the wine. I sliced the ginger,” Will says. Nigel resumes the steady piercing metronome of patching up Will’s shoulder. “He’s been killing me for years.” Ash falls the air, lands on Adam’s pants.

              Well. They’re Adam’s pants for the time being.  

              They’re both silent as Nigel ties off both ends of the stitches. They’re jagged and uneven, and Hannibal would absolutely hate them.

              “Gargle. Spit.” Nigel holds out a glass with a shot of vodka in it. Will is obedient, swishes it around, spits out the liquid laced with blood. It tastes like it’s braising his tongue. Nigel pours the vodka against the outside of his cheek as well, and Will stays as still as he can.

              When Nigel moves even closer with a fresh thread, Will can see every line in his face, the way his eyelashes flutter on his cheek, the deep hollows of his eyes. He can only remember a teaspoonful of times he’s been this physically close to Hannibal, usually through a haze of pain, and he’s certainly not had any time to truly study him. Nigel’s hands are coarser than Hannibal’s artist hands, and Will can feel the solid rough pad of Nigel’s thumb scrape across his jaw, imagines every whorl of the fingerprint raised in identical ridges to the one that had checked him for a stroke, put a knife in Abigail’s throat, pushed his hair back to saw open his forehead. Nigel still has a cigarette in his mouth, and Will can hear the sizzle of the paper curling under embers. He wonders how different his face feels to Nigel, with its topography of scars and scabs and scruff, instead of smooth softness and an easier-won smile. In the picture, Adam had a quality of looking alive, just born. Where Nigel had been drawn to Adam’s lightness, Hannibal had tangled them both into his dark.

              “What’s his name?” Nigel says.

              “Hannibal.” He can feel the stitches shift as he speaks.

              “Where’s he from?”

              “Hell.”

              A quiet laugh. More smoke. “Geographically, darling.”

              “Lithuania.” Will closes his eyes against the pet name, but continues. “But he’s lived in many places. He would never wear the shirt you’re wearing, and he doesn’t smoke. He used to be a surgeon.”

              “Adam wouldn’t try to kill us.”

              Will’s hand snaps closed, and then he slowly rolls his fingers back out. “Stay away from cliffs,” he suggests. “And hope to God you never eat from Hannibal’s table.”

              “It doesn’t sound like you fucking love him back.” Nigel leans away to stub out the cigarette on an ashtray that’s right next to the medical supplies.

              “He is an Icarus, a Lucifer. Flying, falling, so close to the sun, even as your eyes burn, you can’t stop looking.”

              Nigel says nothing, just tugs the needle carefully away from Will’s face.

              “But I am not a moth to his flame, as most are,” Will presses on, despite the fact that he knows it will further mar the already-uneven stitches. Nigel’s fingers stumble on the knots. “It isn’t partnership; it’s dependency. But I know now that I am air to his fire. He breathes me in and singes me, and we burn ever the brighter together—conjoined, we are more than the sun.” His body feels consumed by longing for the substance, so he settles for the form and nestles his cheek into Nigel’s palm; catches his wrist, and murmurs into his hand, “‘Love’ is too a tame a word.”

              Nigel’s fingers brush over his handiwork, a light pressure over the bumps of thread and skin. “You’re both wild, fucking beautiful creatures, in your own way.” Will doesn’t know if he’s talking about him and Hannibal or him and Adam, and lifts his eyes to Nigel’s face.

              He’s wearing a curious expression, as unfathomable and shallow as one of Hannibal’s many faces. “What happened,” Will says, “that you learned also to wear a mask?”

              They maintain steady eye contact. Nigel does not withdraw his hand. “Life, Will. Just like everybody fucking else, the dirty fucking tragedy of everyday life.”

              “You don’t deny the mask.”

              “What’s the fucking point?”

              Will emits a pensive noise. “You both have a taste for poetry. Elevating and transforming the mundane. Tell me,” he says softly. “What do you hate most of all?”

              Nigel’s hand slips from his grasp as he sits back, but he doesn’t move his knee from where it nudges against Will’s. They’re still sitting so close together, across from each other. It’s a familiar format. “Adam fucking hates leaving the apartment,” he begins. “But he’s been doing it more, with me. Who the could just live indoors? He likes museums, Central Park at night, quiet shit. But this is New York fucking City.” He pulls another cigarette from his shirt pocket, not bothering to look down as he lights it with a quick spark of a lighter. “Cars, trains, motherfucking tourists, crazies trying to sell you shit you don’t need.”

              He snorts and blows smoke in Will’s direction. “Dogs. But it’s really the people—the fucking people—who think they’re being quiet. If some drunk asshole is shouting on the street, it’s easy to tell him to shut the fuck up and go the fuck away.” He looks down, stows his sentimentality behind another face somewhere.

              “The pathetic fucking cunts who fucking whisper to each other because they think that just because he is the way he is, Adam can’t hear, laughing, pointing, being motherfucking  _concerned_. The sheer fucking—nerve.”

              He pauses for a breath and Will angles his body just so, a narrow incline worthy of Mount Everest. “It’s rudeness,” he says, winded with joy. Perhaps permanent loss could be a Möbius strip.

              “And fucking—pretense. Lies. Adam doesn’t fucking pretend.”

              “He never lies?”

              “He never lies.”

              Will smiles to himself, and stands slowly, stabilizing himself on the table with one hand. Steps closer, insinuates a leg between Nigel’s knees. “Hannibal never lies, either.” He curves his spine so he’s standing directly above Nigel, so Nigel has to tilt his face upward and bare his throat. The tattoo there is a basic rendering of a woman, a starker contrast than the pale place where his ring should be. “And what do you fear the most?”

              “What does every person fear?” Nigel replies. “Loss.”

              “And yet, here I am,” Will says, leaning ever closer into the foreign aura of crude language and cruder smoke, the familiarity of long, sure fingers and graceful vision. “The very shape and representation of your loss.”

              “I’m the fucking same to you,” Nigel says. “And here we fucking are.”

              “I’m not afraid of loss.” Will nudges Nigel’s ankles further apart with his own feet. The edge of the chair is biting into his knees. They both ignore the lie.

              “Perhaps you’re not a person.”

              Will grants him a sweet, close-lipped smile. “Perhaps.”

              Nigel lifts a hand—cigarette still balanced between his fingers—and runs it deliberately over the scar that curves neatly across Will’s lower abdomen from hip to hip. Smoke trails behind his hand. “He,” Nigel says. “Hannibal fucking gave you this.”

              Will instinctively chases the lingering warmth of the hand and the steady flame, sliding to steady one knee on the chair, clasping his hands around Nigel’s neck. “Both of you, so clever,” he murmurs, voice warmed by a cousin of delight.

              “Not so clever, for both of you to leave us.” Nigel’s voice resonates through him like Hannibal’s, the same shudder of a struck bell riddling its way through his body. And it’s made utterly raw with smoke, and that is what he always craved from Hannibal even though he knew he would never have it.

              “Adam didn’t leave you,” Will says, lowering his sword. Nigel runs the back of his hand up to Will’s sternum, presses a flat, large hand over his heart. The tips of his fingers just dip between bones of the joint in his shoulder and touch upon his collarbone, an uneven pentagram, further disarming him. “I came to you.”

              Nigel’s touch is light as he pushes more firmly into Will’s chest, so it feels like Will’s heartbeat is straining up to be touched through his skin. He can feel the steady, even rhythm. It’s all he can do to close his eyes, force a slow airless blink. He’d kept his eyes open even as Hannibal’s knife had penetrated him so deeply, but a tender touch is simply unbearable.

              “He’s never touched you like this, has he,” Nigel says.

              Will hesitates, and then shakes his head. For all the games, the shards of the teacup tremor between the cracks where they’ve been glued together. “A shame,” Nigel mutters. “A damn fucking shame.”

              “We might have both been the better for it,” Will agrees on a stuttering smile. He raises a hand to draw a line across Nigel’s face where a scar should be, as Nigel traces scars on Will that shouldn’t exist. The cigarette burns out. He flicks it away to sit up and outline the shapes of Will’s bones shifting under his skin, as though he could find breaks and hairline fractures that spoke of places Adam will never go. “I might have been comfortable, at home. With my dogs.”

              “Does his face tell you where home is?”

              “Only if I close my eyes.”

              “Then fucking close them.” The soft press of fingers against his eyelids, tilting his chin up. Nigel touches his throat, runs a thumb across his lips, and Will fights the need to taste it. Nigel's fingers absorb the hollows of his collarbones and the slight bony swell of his hips, a fingernail sliding along the inside of his waistband. It’s slow and present. Will puts his hands firmly on Nigel’s shoulders and opens his eyes on a long and gasping exhale.

              “Now you,” he says, restless.

              He brushes the soft hair off of the gentle curve of the brow, frames the isosceles cheekbones with his hands to reach around, trace a tingling touch along the shell of the ear. He cups the jaw with one hand, as had been done to him earlier, and pushes the hinges of the sharp jaw slightly open. The eyes are half-lidded, a dark tongue-space between the lips. That’s the expression. That’s the face of blood-frantic wonder and lust, the face of the vicious cycle of consuming and being consumed—in the shadow of a lowered lashes and the glint of teeth, the face of cannibalism. He’s being scalded, boiled alive, but Will holds on, digs his hand into the sweep of muscle where neck meets shoulder. He feels his nails press into flesh, and it’s the flinch that breaks the spell.

              “I’m sorry,” he says. Foreign words that have never needed to be said, but the face in front of him is a stranger.

              “He and I are not the same,” Nigel says, looking calmer than Will can imagine feeling at this moment. (That’s the same). “You don’t have to be so fucking careful here. It won’t matter, in the end. You're going back.”

              “I thought you didn’t like being lied to.”

              “Uncertainty isn’t the same as a fucking lie,” Nigel insists.

              Will hitches a patient breath and feels the warm quick embrace of the stag approaching, with a rustle and an impatient animal snort, but Nigel gathers him close. He aligns their bodies more neatly than Will had expected from him—or perhaps that was fate at work, knitting the marrow of each of their bones across universes to slot together easily. “No,” Will hushes. Nigel leans, and his lips hover so close to Will’s that he can feel them vibrate with each sucking breath. “I’m not the one you want,” he says. It’s a slip of a whisper. “It’ll matter to you.”

              In response, Nigel’s fingers slide into his hair, and his own arms snake around the trimness of Nigel’s waist. They’re on the echo of a precipice, and the bluff hovers between dreams and reality. Will can feel both the solid hardwood under his feet and the sticky sea-lit breeze. “When your aesthetics become your ethics—” he starts, leaning a hair further between them, but Nigel places two heavy fingers across his lips as if to silence his intention. His face comes back into focus as he steps backward. They pause in their blurring.        

              “No, that is for him,” Nigel says. “Save yourself.” The words lap over him, like small waves, and it’s an anchor. He sees his small house flickering in the dark expanse of snow.

              “I will,” he says. “I will.”

              He releases slowly, and it feels like benediction.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In case you were curious:  
> \- **Capgras** : Capgras Syndrome or delusion is a disorder where one believes that ones loved ones (friends, family, spouse, and so on) have been replaced by identical imposters.  
> \- The translation of the _Divine Comedy_ is by Mark Musa.  
>  \- **"Myrtha's companions"** : In the ballet _Giselle_ , Myrtha is the Queen of the Wilis. The Wilis are the ghosts of women who have died of a broken heart, and if any man crosses their path, they force him to dance to his death.  
> \- I know that they're supposed to be "suspended over the roiling Atlantic," but I put them in the Chesapeake Bay for several reasons. Given the time frame we're given, it's the closest large expanse of water to Baltimore. There are indeed cliffs, don't worry. It's also the most geographically feasible for survival, as Fuller intended. Lastly, and kind of my main reason—there is a pleasing symmetry to the Chesapeake Ripper being ripped apart by the Chesapeake Bay. Or, if not ripped, at least thoroughly battered.


	2. Anger

"One cannot be resolved unless repentant,

nor can one will and repent a thing

at once—the one is canceled by the other!"

—Dante, “The Inferno”, Canto XXVII

&

             The sky is granite with pre-dawn light when Hannibal wakes. There is something beyond the pain—although that harrows his nerves keenly, a sharp vibrato—something beyond what he can just feel within the confines of his body. He closes his eyes again, and reaches with his senses.

             It still smells like pine, and earth, and saltwater. The calm waters of the Chesapeake are almost out of hearing range, but a constant, soft pressure nonetheless. The animals here are busy early, especially as the cold approaches. The blankets are heavy and warm, warm enough that there is the lightest cling of sweat along his brow, on the back of his neck.

             But it isn’t any of this that wakes him. Although the pain is distractingly loud, he’s quite sure now that it has nothing to do with himself. As slowly as possible, he turns his head to look over at Will. It is a small space, perhaps a meter and a half between their beds, and even in the dim light Hannibal can see the shape of Will beneath his own blankets.

             He is shivering, curled into himself. The curve where his spine meets skull is available to Hannibal’s eyes, tucked under sweat-damp curls. He is uttering the loveliest whimpering noises. He is in pain. He needs Hannibal.

             As quickly as he can manage—fisting his good hand in the sheets in a feral grip when the bullet hole reminds him of its presence—he limps the gap between them. It has only been a few hours since their escape, and he had regarded rest a priority over setting and fixing their injuries. Perhaps that had been a mistake.

            “I’m here,” he says, voice hoarse with disuse. He puts a careful hand on Will’s shoulder, through the blanket. If he is having a nightmare, he could lash out. But he doesn’t, he just lets out a low, anguished groan and keeps trembling and trembling as though they are still soaked in blood and water. Hannibal sits down on the bed, careful not to use Will’s shoulder as support, even though his own is throbbing in its sling. His thighs burn with the effort.

             “Wh—where are we?” Will asks, voice shaking from the effort of using his larynx, paralyzed with cold and fear.

             “I built this place for you,” Hannibal says. “We are on a small tributary that leads into the Bay. Freshwater. Not as plentiful as you are used to, perhaps, but enough.”

             “U—used to?”

             “I—you only shared your catch with me once,” says Hannibal, letting regret instead of resent color his voice. “But it was a delicious catch. With so many more to come.”

             “Please, I—I—”

             Hannibal needs no further invitation—after all, he is only human—his heart could only endure so much arduous longing. He slides easily under the covers, presses his body near to Will’s shivering form, mindful of the wrapped stab wounds and the mildly mangled limbs. “I must admit,” he says quietly, inhaling against the back of Will’s neck. It is salty and clean. “I have waited for this. I would be content if you gave me nothing but your mind, but—my fingers have always itched for beauty, and so they itch for you.”

             “I’m—sorry—”

             Perhaps he is still reticent. Perhaps he is still confined by the utterly tedious confines of sexuality and the notions of bodies and propriety and shame that Americans were, and remain, so fond of. Perhaps he was nervous to let their bodies meld and accept in the way their minds already had (since the beginning); the idea was overwhelming in many ways, even to Hannibal.

             So he merely applies more pressure, threading his good arm underneath Will’s body, to pull him away from the shores of nightmares back to the shores of the Chesapeake. Will is clammy beneath him; breath coming in short hitches like sobs. He cannot bear the thought of Will having second thoughts, so he doesn’t.

“I forgive you,” he mutters into Will’s ear. “I know you were afraid. But we are safe—we are together. Nobody will find us here.”

              “Ni—N—” The shape of Will’s hands shift as he clutches uselessly around a pillowcase, then grip his own shoulders. “Wh—why did you do this to me?”

Hannibal blinks. “We did this together. You are as complicit as I.”

              “I don’t—remember—”

             He quickly buoys his sinking stomach with thoughts of trauma and memory distortion. He could right them to their original form. Will just needs to heal and adjust to his flourishing. The open sky horizon of potential is as daunting as it is freeing, in many ways. So Hannibal says nothing, and instead dares himself to reach for Will’s hand. The sweaty fingers clamp tightly against his in a split second.

             How could he have ever doubted himself. Them.

             He lets himself relax against Will, content for his fingers to be bent between Will’s own. He breathes deeply and evenly to encourage the other to match him. It occurs that as often as he has closed his eyes to stand with Will to look at his nightmares, he has never been physically present for one (although it felt as though they had stood in the realm of the unreal together). Memories and imaginings are unfortunately wrought with a permeating glow that, while sufficient, can cloud certain bright details of reality—the shallow shudder in his breath, the way his fingers twitch reflexively as though they want to close.

              “Nigel—”

              “Will—”

             There is a sharp twist in his wrist as the body in his arms scrambles to sit up, flattens itself against the cold spackled wall. Hannibal exerts stillness over himself, only the smallest movement in his neck to look up. The sudden whip-crack motion had disturbed his shoulder in its setting, jostled the bandaged wound in his side, but he kept silent.

             The creature has Will’s face, or some variation of it—not so cheap as a postcard reprint, but certainly not the original, most recent rendering, made exquisite with scars-to-be in its flesh. The body, is also notably unscarred; the sheet lies low and sparingly across the creature’s naked lap, but there is no stab wound in the shoulder—new, or old—and the belly lacks the raised curve of a linoleum knife. It is Will, but as he might have been long before Hannibal met him (there is no world in which Will and Hannibal do not meet) and thus, less beautiful as a bud than as a becoming.

              “Nigel?”

             Hannibal can hear the heart rev (motorcycles in side streets), thudding back upward to meet a hummingbird tempo. The sobbing breaths are coming in like low tide. He cannot meet the eyes; they flit from shadow to shadow.

              “Why did you call me—?”

             Hannibal sits up. He is vastly larger than the creature before him, the size difference much greater than between him and Will. This—this _boy_ has not spent years in law enforcement, herding dogs, and those hands have wielded a knife nor shot a gun.

              “I don’t understand—what happened to you? Are you hurt?”

              “I am hurt,” Hannibal confirms. “But I don’t think that I am who you are looking for.”

             The hummingbird freezes midflight, cocks its head. “You are different.”

              “So are you.”

              “Did you give me drugs?”

              “No.”

              “Did I ingest drugs on my own, or by accident?”

              “…No.”

              “Are you lying to me?”

              “I endeavor not to lie.”

             The boy bites his lip again, draws his knees up slowly, crosses his arms and digs his fingernails into the skin. He begins to rock back and forth, the bed creaking in rhythm. He emits a low, frustrated moan like a hum.

             This weak, wounded bird. It would be so easy for Hannibal to reach out, to seize its little heart in his hand, to punish it as it deserved for the masquerade. A gross vengeance would be the minimum exacted on anyone who sought to take Will away from him; worse still was the fate for him that dared pretend. He found within himself the eye of the storm that preceded necessary deaths. It had been there when he’d put the comb in Georgia Madchen’s chamber, when he had broken Franklyn’s neck, when he had incapacitated Beverly Katz. It was neither pleasant nor unpleasant, and lacked sensation and any interest. He looks at the boy again. Perhaps it was not worth the effort—besides, how else would Will be retrieved? Surely the answers were locked inside this hollow vessel.

             He should kill it. But it was difficult, now, with the memory of Francis’s throat between his teeth, salty on his tongue, with the image of Will pushing a straight line across the vast abdomen in an echo of his own injuries—with the memory of _it’s beautiful_ in his ears, even now, to muster up the same rage that had let him put a linoleum knife in Will’s belly, a saw against his forehead. In this form, it was almost as though Will was coming to him untouched, perfect for the molding. The idea was alluring—this creature needed him for survival, would depend on him for everything in a way strong, exquisite, dangerous Will never would.

             Rocking back and forth.

              “You have Asperger’s syndrome,” Hannibal hears himself say. “At least, as it was known to be called.” The boy nods vigorously, a tad too long, and still refuses to look anywhere near Hannibal. “I was a psychiatrist for many years. That is how I know.”

              “Where am I?”

              “In a small house but a few miles north from the Chesapeake Bay. There is no registered address.”

              “Who are you?”

              “My name is Hannibal Lecter.”

             The boy registers this, slows his rocking, but starts to flex his hands, open, closed, like an anemone in fast-forward. “Are you related to Nigel?”

              “The last man I met named ‘Nigel’ happened to be a particularly ill-mannered tailor in London,” Hannibal says. “So unless Nigel is English, a tailor, and has been missing for several years, I don’t even know him.”

             The boy furrows his brow. “You—you look just like him. Your face—except, your voice is different, and you don’t smell the same, and you have a scar on your face that I couldn’t see before—”

              “You, also, look almost exactly like a man I know. A near perfect rendering—only you lack certain scars. As though”—Hannibal sighs, impatient with the idea—“you came from the same mold, but were poured from different artists’ hands. Two different worlds.” He half-expects the boy to panic, or to scream, but instead he looks up and meets Hannibal’s eyes for the briefest of moments. He cannot help himself: “He also dislikes eye contact.”

              “It’s—it’s not feasible, but it’s possible. I don’t know—nobody knows—how it would happen, but string theory posits that there are eleven parallel universes. We will never know, of course, considering both our physical limitations and the expansion of the—”

              “Suppose you and I, by some happy accident, do know. Now, we know.”

             The boy stills at the prospect. “When it comes to the unknowable, the logical is fallible. I guess it doesn’t really matter why. I can’t let it matter why, if I’m going to—” His fingernails rake back into his arms.

              “Breathe, little one,” Hannibal says, shifting slowly closer. “What is your name?”

              “Adam. Adam Raki. I used to be an electrical engineer, but now I work in space exploration.”

              “That would explain your interest in physics.”

              “Are you interested in physics? In string theory?” Adam fixes the spot behind Hannibal’s ear with a focused stare.

              “Not primarily,” Hannibal says. “I have kept up in my field.”

              “Of course,” Adam says, and ducks his head for a lightning smile. “I am having difficulty adapting to this situation,” he admits.

              “That either of us are adapting at all could be considered remarkable to the point of being absurd,” Hannibal says. “But the human mind is nothing if not resilient.”

              “Much more plastic than we ever envisioned,” Adam agrees. “It was commonly thought that we couldn’t grow new brain cells, at all, but recent research suggests not only that we can, but that the rate we do it at—I’m sorry.” He draws a breath. “I’m working on talking less and focusing more.”

              “Not at all. I find your voice pleasant, though I must say the differences in your accent and cadence rear their heads often.”

             A pause. “If you’re my Nigel, who was your Adam?”

              “‘Is,’” Hannibal corrects, not unkindly. “His name is Will Graham.”

             “Is _he_ interested in physics?”

             “Not so much the technicalities, I don’t think, although it would do to ask.”

              “Is he also your husband?”

              “Ah—no.” He feels himself slip completely out of orbit for a moment, rare except for moments he spends subsumed in absolute pleasure: Wine. Music. Will. The straightforward honest innocence of the question—no layers to speak of. Although the mechanics of Adam’s mind are complex, there is a certain simplicity to his thought and speech that Hannibal appreciates; it is much like Pacific cod with salt, pepper, and lemon. Clean. Fresh. Adam can no more help his own nature than Will can. They both contain multitudes, though the shapes of the facets on the gems differ. “We are not legally married.”

              “Are you illegally married?”

             Hannibal considers his answer. “No,” he says, finally. “We are not wedded in any traditional sense of the way.”

             It earns him another small smile. “You are being evasive,” Adam says. He uncurls a little.

              “I suppose that I am.” Hannibal allows his posture to relax. “But for a lack of a word, not evasiveness for its own sake.”

             Adam nods again. “Sometimes I feel that way about Nigel. I dislike considering alternatives too strongly. Either I end up with clichéd or vague terms, so I prefer the word ‘husband.’ It’s legally accurate, and cultural connotations make up for the rest.”

             They steadily maintain the closest thing Adam can manage to eye contact. Hannibal’s eye evaluates him now with another lens. Given Adam’s comfort in his condition, the way he inhabits his tendencies with very little conflict, it is likely that he was born into a supportive family, one that sought to accept and educate him rather than attempt to correct. Interesting, considering Adam and Will’s age bracket.

              “I’m sorry I woke you up,” Adam says softly, pulling Hannibal from the recesses of his mind.

              “Not at all,” Hannibal says. “I needed to”—here he attempts to stand up briskly, finds that for the glowering of the gunshot wound, the splinter of pain in his shoulder, he cannot—“dress this, in any case.”

             Adam makes a noncommittal noise and tucks the blanket more carefully around himself. Slowly, Hannibal stands, limping to the small bathroom in the corner to examine his side. Gingerly, with only the use of his left arm, he unwraps the bandage he had rather carelessly wrapped around himself before collapsing earlier. He also pulls off the sling, dropping the melted, useless ice pack he’d wrapped against his shoulder into the sink.

             It’s a small, neat hole in his side. Considering it is probably a minor hepatic injury, he could have done worse than plunging into frigid water, although infection would now be the main concern. He stares down at it, contemplates trying to twist around to look through the wound, tosses the impulse into the trash where it belongs. Instead he pulls the large box of medical supplies out from underneath the sink, removes all his clothing, and washes his hands. Then he snaps on a nitrile glove (in case Will is allergic to latex—which he hadn’t had an opportunity to test), and sits in the bathtub.

             The wound is now oozing steadily, bleeding picking back up with the warmth and the lack of pressure. He takes a bottle of hydrogen peroxide and pours it generously over the wound in front, watching it foam up in contact with the wound. He considers that he might have vastly underprepared for this eventuality. With some maneuvering, he manages to slop hydrogen peroxide over his shoulder, a steady stream down his back. He’s sitting in a pool of blood-thinned disinfectant. It’s not the most pleasant sensation.

              “Do you need help?” Adam is standing in the doorway, the sheet tucked around him. In the incandescent bright light of the bathroom, he looks like some carved figure Hannibal had memorized in the shadows of the Uffizi, white and draped and stark.

             Hannibal doesn’t answer but Adam washes his hands anyway, takes a pair of gloves and shuts the toilet to sit on it, leaning over Hannibal in the tub. “Is that—did you get shot?”

              “Yes,” Hannibal grunts. It’s inelegant, but the pain is rapidly ascending his spine in a blue flame. Adam gently pries the bottle from Hannibal’s hand. He can feel the warmth of his hand through the plastic of the glove, and it’s no reassurance that it’s trembling slightly.

              “Who shot you?”

              “He is dead now.”

              “Did you kill him?”

              “Yes.”

             But—“Nigel used to come home with all sorts of injuries,” Adam says, taking the bottle and pouring the disinfectant in a gentle stream directly over the wound in Hannibal’s back. “He got shot in the arm once. I will not help you take the bullet out, if it’s embedded. I fainted and concussed myself when Nigel used a knife to dig it out.”

             Hannibal just watches the gentle movements of his face, and is startled by the sudden eye contact. “What next?”

              “Gauze. Tape. Bandages.” Adam pulls the three items out of the box, watches intently as Hannibal creates a makeshift pack with what he has, and tapes it down as Hannibal holds it against himself. He makes another one under Hannibal’s watchful gaze, and then tapes that to his back. Not too tight, not too loosely—then he helps wind the bandages around his middle.

              “You’re bleeding a lot,” Adam observes.

              “The bullet probably grazed my liver,” Hannibal says. “What you just made—a perihepatic pack—it’ll help stop the bleeding while the wound is open. We’ll need to check every few hours or so. If worst comes to worst, we might have to find a way to cauterize the worst of it.”

             Adam shudders, and closes his eyes for a moment. “Who branded you?”

             Hannibal recalls the rough edges of the burn on his back, wonders if the bullet had gone through it. “Somebody who wanted Will and me dead,” he says. “Nearly four years ago.”

              “Verger,” Adam reads, brushing the lettering with the pads of his fingers. “Verger Estates? The pork company?”

              “Not just pork. But yes.” Hannibal is content to sit for a moment, the new tightness of the bandages comforting. “They exist—for you?”

              “Yes. The head of the company was awful. He advocated strongly against various proposed federal regulation measures, some of which I did not understand. Face-branding, for instance. I didn’t understand the benefit of that.”

              “It leaves the rest of the pig unscarred.”

             Adam shrugs. “But he suffered a horrible accident. He broke his neck and lost half his face when his sister’s horse spooked and trampled him.”

             It brings a quick, vicious joy to Hannibal’s face.

              “He contended that his sister had done it on purpose,” Adam continues. “But taking it to court ended up being the biggest mistake. She testified under oath that he had been abusing her terribly since they were children under the guidance of their father. Although the will cut her out of the inheritance, the reparations the court assigned her essentially wiped the estate clean. She has since started a nonprofit organization to benefit foster children.”

             Hannibal’s smile takes on a different hue. “That’s my girl,” he says. “You seem to have followed this case quite closely.”

              “I was dating a woman whose family was…prominent in New York society,” Adam says, ignoring the surprised flick of Hannibal’s eyebrow. “Her father didn’t like Miss Verger because she was a lesbian. Also, when I started learning to cook, I researched all my options thoroughly so that I could make the most ethical decisions possible. Of course, the most ethical decision would be to stop eating meat, but Nigel absolutely refused.”

              “Or to harvest the meat yourself,” Hannibal says.

              “It’s the mass production and environmental impact that bothers me more than the slaughter.”

              “Then you must find an animal that deserves it.”

              “It’s impossible to measure morality in any animal except—” Adam stops when he feels Hannibal looking at him intently. “What happened to the Vergers?”

              “Much of the same.” Hannibal is content to let the moment pass, for now. “Although I do not know where Margot is at the moment. I will find her the first opportunity I get.”

              “I thought the Vergers wanted you dead.”

              “Mason. Her brother. She—indirectly. I may present a threat to her wife.”

             Adam considers him for a moment. Hannibal looks at the tap so that Adam might feel more comfortable. “Nigel told me when I first met him that I shouldn’t ask what he did, because then I could be liable for obstruction of justice, aiding and abetting, and hiding evidence from the police, among other things. I told him that if it would get me in so much trouble, he should probably stop doing it.”

             Hannibal can’t help a small snort. “A sensible conclusion,” he says. “Unless—you can’t help it.”

              “Well, I can’t think of a crime you can’t help. Drug addiction, to some extent. And…” Adam trails off with a precipitous sigh. “Serial killers can be pathological,” he says. “But a serial killer still has a sense of good and evil, unless he’s truly psychotic. People too often confuse psychotics with psychopaths. But Nigel wasn’t a serial killer. He ran drugs.”

              “A drug addict?”

              “He used to be.”

             It isn’t a sneer, quite—but he can’t help the thinning of his lips. Hannibal prided himself on his control, on his self-reliance. To be dependent and subject to the chemicals in your veins or up your nose is a source of sore weakness, and the idea that his parallel self could be so careless offends him.

              “He’s one of the strongest, bravest men I know,” Adam adds, as though Hannibal’s thoughts were laid bare. “You can’t always help your birth or your childhood. You can help your adult life. And we're all addicted to some thing or another.”

              “What are you addicted to?”

              “Worry,” Adam says immediately. “It’s something I don’t have to do, and sometimes it would be healthier if I didn’t, but it feels safer to worry than to— _be,_ without doubting yourself.”

              “Easier to walk the world fettered by our faults than to shoulder the callous burden of freedom,” Hannibal says.

              “And what are you addicted to?”

             Breathing is easier, now, with his wound packed tightly. His shoulder is bothering him still, the pain medication wearing off. The shards of pain jut out from the shoulder, and it’s visibly bruised and swollen, despite the ice he’d placed on it. It looks awful freed from its sling, a misshapen lump of bone and joint. A pound of flesh—perhaps also taken in twisted retribution.

              “Beauty,” Hannibal says after a moment. “I cannot stop myself from admiring that which is beautiful, and abhorring that which is not.”

             Adam draws his knee up to rest his chin. “I don’t know if we’d find the same things beautiful,” he says. “Nigel and I have very different opinions. I am much more simple, and easily pleased—the images of Pluto rendered by the Voyager probe this past year were stunning. The stars move me often.”

              “I don’t think we share taste,” Hannibal says. “But it’s _that_ you appreciate that matters.” Hannibal tries to steady himself comfortably against the wall of the tub as Adam fiddles with the hem of the sheet he’s wrapped in.

              “I’d like to put on clothes now,” Adam says.

             Hannibal nods. “There are clothes that will fit you in the bureau on the left. I will need your help, after you are dressed.”

              “Okay.” Adam leaves, and Hannibal focuses on getting out of the tub without further injuring himself. The way he’s seated, without the use of his right arm to provide leverage, it takes a good deal of highly ungraceful twisting—like a cat in a bath—to get up. He holds a towel against himself, mostly for Adam’s sake than any shame of his own. It’s difficult, after all, to flay others without being comfortable in your own skin. Waiting a moment, he knocks smartly against the inside of the door of the bathroom, so as to let Adam know he is coming through.

             Adam is just pulling a sweater on over one of Will’s shirt, gray cable-knit over white. It’s all a little big for him, like hand-me-downs, and it makes Hannibal’s insides twist for a moment.

              _You’re walking down the street and you see a wounded bird._

             He watches the shoulder seams of the sweater slouch down a centimeter or two past the curve of Adam’s shoulder.

              _Extreme acts of cruelty require a high degree of empathy._

             Adam’s head turns toward him, but his eyes slide past him to fix past his shoulder, flicking back and forth to take in the scars that riddle his body. Like a map: Baltimore, Florence, New York, Paris—a cold dead field in rural Lithuania.

              _You’re not a killer._

              “What did you need help with?” Adam asks.

              “Come here.”

             Adam stands in front of him, bites his lip when Hannibal goes to his knees. Leaning heavily on his left hand, Hannibal lowers himself onto the cold, flat floor.

              “Please move my right arm. As perpendicular as possible to my body.”

Adam kneels next to him, hands soft and warm where they circle his wrist and cradle his elbow, moving it up. He deliberates over the placement, tilting his head this way and that to ascertain that it is perpendicular as an asymmetrical human body can be. He stills at the wince Hannibal cannot help, the fire in the joint burning, burning.

              “Is it broken?”

              “No,” Hannibal says, through a deep breath. “Merely dislocated, although there may be hairline fractures. I am very fortunate.”

              “Hannibal, you should go to a hospital,” Adam says.

              “I was a surgeon before I was a psychiatrist,” Hannibal says.

              “That doesn’t mean you don’t have to go to the hospital.”

              “If I go to the hospital, I will lose all I have gained. I lose Will—and you are left alone. You will survive our separation no better than I.”

             Adam flinches at the acid roiling in Hannibal’s tone, obvious enough even to him. “Please—don’t yell,” he says.

             Hannibal calms his breathing and closes his eyes. “Dislocations occur when a joint is forcibly popped from its socket. The shoulder, being the most mobile joint in the body, is most easily dislocated, particularly when sustaining the brunt of a fall. What you are going to do is to help me put the bones back where they belong.”

              “I don’t know if I can—”

              “You will need to listen carefully, Adam.”

             He stills at the use of his name.

              “Grasp my wrist. Firmly, now.”

             Breath in, out.

             “Brace yourself against the floor. Take your socks off.”

             Adam folds the socks neatly and places them on the bed closest to him. Hannibal doesn’t doubt that Will would toss them on the floor, at least for the moment.

              “Don’t start yet—count to three, then pull, slowly, as hard as you can. You will feel the joint come loose. Continue to pull, and I will readjust my shoulder as necessary.”

             Adam is pale, pale in the soft glow of the bathroom light. Hannibal wishes he’d thought to turn on the overhead light here in the bedroom, but pain is the same illuminated or otherwise, so instead, he closes his eyes.

             He feels Adam’s fingers curl around his wrist. They stick lightly with sweat. He thinks of Will, and encephalitis, how gorgeously the small seizure in his dining room had ceded control to Hannibal’s hands and judgment.

              “One,” Adam quavers, “two…three.” And he pulls—Hannibal opens his mouth to tell him to pull harder, but then he can feel the strain, his shoulder screams, tearing at itself—

             Steady breath, in, out.

             Screaming, screaming.

             He focuses inward, pushes deep into the reserves of the stillest place in his mind.

             There is a Japanese phrase, not old, but certainly not modern— _hara wo kukuru,_ meaning literally “to bundle the stomach.” It indicates resolve, to carry something through no matter what. Hannibal has always been fond of the Japanese tendency to place emotions in the stomach rather than the heart— _seppuku_ , ritual suicide, was performed with a knife dragged along the bowels, was the way for a person to restore or preserve the honor of the family. American soldiers who landed in Okinawa in the latter stages of the Pacific Theater were horrified at the ease with which their opponents committed suicide, but in the Japanese schema, it was the body that died for the prosaic sanctity of the name.

             So, now— _hara wo kukutte,_ he carries through regardless, even as he feels the world clench down only to the points of pain. He fights the temptation to clench his teeth and hold his breath.

             In, out.

             Like most dislocations, his shoulder had popped forward out of the socket, sliding to grind against the bone. His joint is well separated now, the loose space hanging in the middle, providing a strange sensation of relief despite the screeching agony. The machinations of extremes are always fascinating, and so even as he bears the pain he seeks to observe it.

             He shifts, attuned with his body in a way few people are. Hannibal is nothing if not remarkable, in spite of himself. He could have been so common, so fragile, but instead, he chose to make something of himself. Shift, up, down.

             Then there is an awful cracking noise, a soft popping noise (a cork out of a wine bottle), and he feels his shoulder realign. He doesn’t make a sound, except maybe to quicken his breathing—even when he had been shot, the groan that had left him was covered by the grand shattering of glass behind him.

             “You can let go,” he gasps.

             Adam, to his credit, doesn’t drop his arm, but places it gently on the floor. Then he draws his knees up again to himself, his hands opening and closing against the floor. He waits quietly, intently, for Hannibal’s breath to even. “Don’t fall asleep,” he manages. “You’re much heavier than I am, I won’t be able to move you.”

             Hannibal’s eyes are closed, but he quirks a smile. “I won’t. If you could get me ice, please—the other door will lead to a hallway, which has a light switch on the immediate right. If you go straight, you will find the kitchen. The ice will be in the freezer. There should be some packs set aside.”

             When Adam is gone, he rolls over—onto his left side—and tries to get up. But he is winded by pain, old aches coming back in the chill, and the sheer exhaustion of the day. He had attempted to keep fit in prison, but when all you’re given is books and paper, well.

             There’s a hitch of breath at the door. Soft footsteps. Adam’s hands tilt him back onto his back, cushion his shoulder when it touches the ground. He then places an ice pack on top.

             “Ah—sorry.”

             “Nothing I haven’t seen before,” Adam says.

             It takes Hannibal a moment before he realizes it’s a joke, dry as a good brut. He laughs, which seems to startle Adam. “Yes,” he agrees. “Although, if you wouldn’t mind—my clothes are in the bureau next to where you found yours.” He’s handed clean, dry things; it feels miraculous when, with a little more inelegant wiggling, he gets them on. Another deep breath for his efforts, then he goes to stand. Adam quickly huddles into Hannibal’s left side, lowers him onto the bed.

             “I’m going to get your sling. Don’t move.” He comes back with the bandages and cloth, directing Hannibal’s limbs with sure, steady hands, batting his hands away when Hannibal tries to help.

             “Bossy little thing, aren’t you,” Hannibal murmurs.

             “I know how to do this. There’s no reason you should have to move at all.” His brow is furrowed in focus, and there’s a quiet intimacy in being cared for that Hannibal has yet to share with Will—to put himself in the other’s hands as he had so many times done for Will. (Which he has forgiven both Will and himself for. There are no sharps in his conscience.) He hums a little as Adam works, the _Adagio cantabile_ from Beethoven’s “Pathetique” piano sonata. The ice is bandaged securely to his shoulder, and Hannibal must admit that Nigel has trained Adam well. Finally, Adam ties the ends of the sling in a firm knot in the space between Hannibal’s neck and shoulder, hands sliding behind to sweep his hair out from under the sling, warm fingers sliding underneath the edge of the cloth to check that it wasn’t too tight. Hannibal had forgone a shirt, as mangling his arm was not worth it, and so the edges of Adam’s nails are vivid and blunt ants across his skin. They are stunningly close, close enough for Hannibal to observe the butterfly ridge of Adam’s eyelashes. His lips are red and wet where he’d bitten them. Like the rosebud lips of Boticelli’s Venus, coy, ethereal almost, born of sea foam.

             Born on the shore.

             “Thank you,” Hannibal says quietly.

              “I—I—I’m sorry,” Adam shudders. They are both unwilling to break the still air, and Adam is staring steadily at the space just under Hannibal’s chin, even as he begins to shake.

              “What for?”

             “I just—you’re hurt, but I just want to go home, I want to go home, I want to go—”

             “Shh, little one.” He gathers Adam close to him, against his chest. Even in this state, Adam avoids Hannibal’s injured arm. The thread that connects Will and Adam, lives just under their mutual skins is compassion. It’s a wound that Will tries to mask while Adam limps openly, and Hannibal has always liked the smell of blood.

              Adam rocks against him still, breath coming rapid and shallow. “You’re all right, _zvyozdochka_.”

             “Is that—that’s not Romanian.”

             “No,” Hannibal says. “It’s Russian. What brought Romanian to mind?”

             “Nigel is from Romania,” Adam says, muffled against Hannibal’s chest. His breath tickles. “Sometimes he talks to me—swears—”

             “I grew up—near there.” The personal information slips out unbidden, and he awkwardly attempts to stem the flow. Adam still trembles, hands clenching compulsively.

              “I’m—I’m sorry—”

             “Hush. Focus on your breathing.” Hannibal curves his spine to allow Adam more space, then gradually leans back onto the bed. It feels wonderful and plush, the relief of tension in his spine spidering out into his skin. He shifts so Adam bears some of his weight, a comforting weight he knows will soothe the man, still holding him close.

             “I want to go home, I want to go home, I want to go home.” Adam is muttering under his breath.

             “The first song I ever learned to play properly on the piano,” Hannibal says, “was Bach’s Minuet. So simple, but so bewitching in its simplicity.” His fingers twitch with muscle memory. “And though there are certain things I forget, it is still Bach that stays with me everywhere I go. He haunts the halls of my memory palace.

             “I would play obsessively, even as a child. My sister would sit next to me on the piano bench, attempt to contribute a few notes here and there. I would shove her off, because I was practicing. Besides, the random notes were discordant. Unpleasant.” The memories all come out in a torrent, measured though they may be by the easy pace of Hannibal’s voice. “What are you doing to me, _zvesda moya_ , hm? I will run out of secrets and then will have no stories to tell.”

             Adam smiles despite himself. “I doubt that.”

             “Just breathe. Easy, for me. Breathe.” Hannibal enforces this by breathing deeply and evenly himself, and succumbs to the heavy pull of exhaustion.

&

             They sleep like that for a few nights. Even if the night doesn’t start that way, Hannibal grows used to the heavy weight on his side, murmuring soft things to quiet thoughts, still hands, dry tears. It is an odd mix of the cherished guardianship he felt for Abigail, and the betrayal of his mind, feeding him love for Will’s face despite all evidence to the contrary. Hannibal sleeps, directs Adam in the kitchen, recovers as best he can. Only a few days out from under the white eye of the hospital is enough to loosen the bitterness in his lungs.

             Then, one night, Hannibal wakes to an empty, cold bed. Adam’s bed is also empty, and he quashes the wild thought that perhaps Will has returned, complete with insomnia. He walks into the kitchen and looks out the window. He can just barely discern Adam’s blurry shape in a clearing where the bright moonlight spills. So he takes his coat and walks.

             Hannibal lowers himself slowly onto the carpet of dead wood and dirt and pine needles to look up at the sky, letting out a sharp breath when he finally lands to sit. Adam looks over past him, eyes impossibly liquid and wide in the moonlight. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I didn’t mean to—I didn’t want to wake you up, but you’re injured, so you shouldn’t be sitting on the ground in the cold.”

              “What can you see?” Hannibal asks.

             Adam bites his lip, a nervous habit he and Will do not share. “You should be inside,” he says again.

              “Tell me what you see.”

              “Nothing unusual.” Adam turns to look back up. “Not for this time of year, and our location. The families of Ursa major and minor, in the center there.” Hannibal’s eyes follow to the pinpricks of light that Adam points to as he narrates. “Leo, Virgo. Gemini, Perseus, Cassiopeia. If that cloud moves, we should be able to just see Mars.”

              “An ancient sky tonight,” Hannibal murmurs.

             Adam blinks. “Not anymore so than any other night. Even excluding what we don’t know, there are bound to be a fairly even ratio of older stars to younger ones.”

              “And so you are right,” Hannibal concedes. “A proud sky, then, perhaps. Certainly a large one, to hold even Cassiopeia’s hubris.”

             When Adam laughs, a short, breathy thing, he ducks his head. Will, similarly, seeks to hide his joy from the world. “And only getting larger,” Adam says. “The acceleration of the size of the universe—everything we see will disappear, as objects diffuse into the increased space.”

              “Soon, all of this,” Hannibal says, much more to himself, “will be lost to the sea.”

              “That’s why I became fascinated by space,” Adam continues. “Because it’s wide and vast, and each object is far—in real distance, not relative—from the other.”

              “Does it comfort you, that stars can barely see each other’s light?”

             Adam nods in his vigorous way. “I liked the sky because every star seemed alone, and I knew what it was like to be alone. I didn’t know what other people were thinking, but I did know that we were far away.”

              “And has—Nigel helped you close the distance?” Hannibal looks at him, studies the softness of the shoulders and skin, the unforced small smile. The clarity of his expressions, the consistent reliability of his moods—those are things meant for another world, not the narrow spaces of Hannibal’s mind. But one can imagine, even if such wanderings are dangerous.

              “Not between other people,” Adam says. “That wouldn’t make sense. But he has made me feel less alone.”

              “I cannot remember what it felt like to be content with loneliness,” Hannibal says. “I know that once, I reveled in it. But I have been remade at Will’s hands, over and over again. As he has been by mine.”

             “You don’t sound happy about it.”

             “I am not _happy_ about it,” Hannibal confirms. “But it is joy. It is a reckless joy nonetheless. Zadie Smith wrote an essay about joy, describing its fierceness, its keenness. Joy is not happiness as we conceive of it in our feeble emotional vocabulary—joy can be felt through blood, and tears, and anguish. Exquisite anguish, that we might find such heights of elation.”

             Adam considers him for a long moment. “I haven’t read that.”

             “I don’t have a copy now, I’m afraid.”

             “I probably wouldn’t read it anyway.” Adam shakes his head. “It sounds very—esoteric. It’s easier to understand—not literally, I understand the _words_ , it’s comprehending them at all in a personal context that is difficult.”

             Hannibal can’t help but smile at Adam’s directness, which could have looked like rudeness on another person. _I don’t find you that interesting._

             “You will,” Hannibal says. “I think you will understand it. But—it’s late. Come now, my little astronaut.”

             “I’m not an astronaut,” Adam protests, but gets to his feet and reaches out an automatic hand to help Hannibal up. “Besides, I prefer the term ‘cosmonaut’ in any case— _astro_ implies that we are flying far into the stars, while _cosmo_ connotes that we are exploring closer to home.”

             “Very wise,” Hannibal says. “I wouldn’t want to know how your space company is doing without you.”

             Adam opens his mouth, perhaps to correct Hannibal again, but instead he steadies them along the path, pushes the door closed, divests Hannibal of his coat. As he folds it over the back of a dining room chair, he says, “Don’t make fun of me, Hannibal.”

             “That has never been my intention,” Hannibal says, walking as evenly as possible down the hallway to flick the light on. “I simply—”

             He watches Adam undress, takes in the flat, almost scrawny planes of his body. Unblemished skin, and Hannibal wants to mark it, own it. “I am simply charmed by you,” Hannibal says finally. “Enchanted, perhaps.”

             Adam snorts. “I did ask you not to make fun of me.”

             “Come to bed. Time to sleep, darling.” Hannibal busies himself with turning down Adam’s bed, sharply made. He only stops when he feels he is being watched. “Is something the matter?”

             “Ah—no. Nothing. I just—”

             Hannibal turns off the bedside lamp and settles into the bed. He should have known they could have started using the king-sized bed straight away. “We’ll get you home, Adam,” he says. “We’ll get home.” Adam joins him, and they are swiftly asleep. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> - **Hepatic** : Relating to the liver. Injuries to the liver tend to be fatal because of blood loss and subsequent shock, considering the number of blood vessels that lead in and out of it. I literally do not know how Bryan Fuller expects these two to survive.  
> \- _**hara wo kukuru, kukutte**_ : A saying that's not used very commonly nowadays, but not totally. There are two different tenses used here (sorrry, it was Hannibal's fault). While _kukuru_ is "to bundle", while _kukutte_ is "he bundles"; in this case, to describe a present action. I wish I could explain this better.  
>  \- **_zvyozdochka, zvesda moya_** : my little star + diminuitive variations  
> \- Cassiopeia, according to Greek mythology, was a queen who defied the gods by proclaiming that she and her daughter were more beautiful than the daughters of Nereus (a sea god), which enraged Poseidon. He would only be appeased by the sacrifice of Andromeda to the sea, but Perseus rescues her (and then ditches her later, but that's a different story) before she is claimed by Poseidon. Cassiopeia is strapped to a chair and doomed to roam the heavens, where she spends half her time 'upside-down'—hence the shape of the constellation.


	3. Bargaining

 

“So long a time has Love kept me a slave

and in his lordship fully seasoned me,

that even though at first I felt him harsh,

now tender is his power in my heart.”

\- Dante Alighieri, “ _La Vita Nuova_ ”, Chapter XXVIII

 

“Every night?”

“Every fucking night.”

Will steps back to lean on the kitchen counter. “Do you?”

“What?”

“Every night.”

“God, no. I’d rather die.”

Nigel sounds almost as prim as Will imagines Hannibal might be, and he has to laugh, muffled behind a hand. “Jesus.”

“It’s pretty grim,” Nigel agrees. “I’ve tried to mix it up a little, but—”

“—He likes what he likes.” Will stands straight again and shuts the freezer door. “Still. That’s a lot of cheese and pasta.”

Nigel tilts his head, looking at the freezer door rather than at Will. “It’s been a while since I thought about it.”

“Hannibal has a way of reminding you of what you’re eating all the time,” says Will, tongue barely tripping over the layers of meaning. It’s easier now, after the Dragon, after the fall, and in absentia. He wonders if this is how Hannibal has felt the entire time, being so painstakingly honest in front of blind men.

No. He’s just delighted by his own cleverness. What grown man enjoys puns that much?

“Good cook?” Nigel asks, lighting a cigarette.

Will frowns at the click of the lighter, but answers: “Excellent chef. He once served tomatoes suspended in blood plasma.”

“Is that even food?”

“As much as frozen mac’n cheese. Apparently, it has a sweet taste.”

Nigel just blows out a long stream of smoke and shrugs, one-shouldered. “Yeah, I’ll take ice cream, thanks.”

“He cooked like that every day,” Will says. “Even just for himself.”

“Psychiatrists make their own hours.”

“He had a lot of time on his hands. But it is art to him.”

Nigel flicks off the light and Will takes that as a cue to go back to the dining room table, which is littered with pamphlet menus. That’s what they had been deciding before the interlude at the freezer, Nigel delighted to share the glories of New York take-out. Tonight, it was Indian.

“Art,” Nigel echoes, sitting heavily. “Haven’t got the mind for it.”

“That can’t be true.” Will sits directly across from Nigel. He suspects, both from the wedding rings and the imprints on the seat cushion, that Nigel and Adam sit kitty-corner from each other, legs brushing under the table. He’s certainly not going to do that. Besides, sitting across from Hannibal’s face, regardless of the loose shirts and cigarette smoke, is familiar in a way that hooks longing deep into his chest. The lures of simpler times—the two of them, contemplating pink wine in the warm otherworld of Hannibal’s office, wondering nothing beyond how much deeper they would dig into each other’s mind. He’d had so little understanding, had seen so little. No wonder he’d needed his glasses so often. A small smile rises unbidden, and his wound twitches in pain.

He probably should be eating Jell-O or something, in his condition, but he’s been granted a second chance, and he’ll be damned if he’ll spend it eating fucking Jell-O. His smile only grows—perhaps Hannibal, so catlike, understood that this was his ninth life, and was determined to ravage the world with his meditations on beauty. Will firmly shuts down the train of thought that rattles along in a dark tunnel, that perhaps Hannibal had run out of lives, that perhaps, after everything, Will would still be alone.

Nigel stubs his cigarette out in a cheap black ashtray, face lit by the screen of his phone as he flicks through it.

Well, not entirely alone. But they’d both have to shift their orbits, if Will was wrong about him and Adam and the switch. God, or if he was wrong about Hannibal, and Adam was drying out in strips of human jerky.

Yeah, get off that train, Graham.

He clears his throat to clear his mind. “So,” he says, toying with the label on his beer. “Why don’t you like art?”

“Art doesn’t like me.” Nigel grunts. “I never learned how, I guess.”

“Neither did I,” Will says. “But art—presents itself. In daily life. If you stop to notice it, I guess.”

“It’s hard to stop in the city.”

“Still.” Will leans forward, bracing his elbows on the table. _Rude_ , a voice whispers. “Aren’t there moments where you feel—arrested?”

Nigel barks out a sharp laugh, and Will has to grin, too. It’s—what did they call it?—gallows humor, perfectly executed. “Well, darling, I hope not to feel arrested anytime soon.”

A feeling like a sparkler plummets straight _down_ at the spontaneous endearment. Smoke-roughened, hewn with the same chisel that had shaped Hannibal’s voice— _darling_ , so light on the tongue. Said with none of the reverence that Hannibal reserved for even Will’s name, but—strewn through the tumult of words in the day like veins in marble, something sweet and unrushed about them. Like they had all the time in the world.

Will and Hannibal stood so often waiting for death to crawl up and root them permanently in time, more often by each other’s own hands than not, that the idea of being casual about their devotion was almost hilariously ridiculous.

Will finds himself straddling the line of hysteria often, as of late. He’s gasping for air, but he doesn’t know if he’s being robbed by sobs or laughter. Although he hasn’t had another panic attack, he’s still off-kilter—Adam’s clothes are slightly too small, down to the boxer-briefs he’s mortifyingly had to borrow. Nigel walks loudly, announcing his presence with every movement—Will doesn’t know if it’s for Adam or if the man just can’t help himself.

The doorbell rings. Will nearly gives himself whiplash at the sound.

“Easy,” Nigel mutters, and answers it. Murmurs, cash exchanged, the rustle of plastic bags. The smell of spices bursts into the air, nearly chasing out the smoke.

“Thanks.” They parcel out the Styrofoam boxes and foil-wrapped naan, tossing the plastic utensils in favor of Adam and Nigel’s silverware, but keeping the thin excuses for napkins.

“ _God_ ,” Will says, through his first mouthful.

 _Rude_.

 _Shut up_.

“So fucking good.”

Nigel grins at him. “Isn’t it? Was worried that when I moved to America they wouldn’t have a proper curry.”

“It’s New York City,” Will says. “What _can’t_ you get?”

They chew through the stark obviousness of the one thing they’re both missing.

“I missed this,” says Will, taking a lentil samosa with his hands, reveling in the sheen of grease on his fingertips.

“What, didn’t you live in D.C.? FBI, and everything?”

“I lived in Maine for the last three years.” He takes a bite of samosa—it’s too hot, and the spices are biting viciously at the stitches in his mouth, and it’s perfect. “Fucking Maine. I mean—Jesus. But it was a trade-off.”

“What did you have in Maine?”

“Wife. Kid. Sort of. He was hers from before.”

He doesn’t know what he expects, but it isn’t—chew, swallow, “I was married too.” Nigel looks directly at him, and Will sees the nervousness in the defiance of the gesture.

“Does Adam know?”

Nigel is silent for a moment. He wipes his mouth, and the vermillion of the curry stains through translucent into the paper. “Yes.”

Will just raises his eyebrow and takes a sip of his beer.

But Nigel doesn’t elaborate. They eat in silence. After they are finished, Will clears the table and Nigel unlocks a kitchen cabinet to retrieve the whiskey, as has been their custom for the past few nights, and they squeeze onto the landing of the fire escape outside. On the first night, it had been littered with cigarette butts that Nigel had thoughtfully cleared by sweeping them down onto the street with his foot, and now they sat, watching cars and lights and airplanes go by.

The whiskey isn’t half bad, holding a semblance of flavor before it turns to burn in his cheek and throat. Will takes another swallow before passing the bottle over. Perhaps he would’ve liked the city. D.C., maybe. He’d kept running farther and farther away, until the hush of snow-pelted Wolf Trap was interrupted, and then the even more distant calm of Maine had been shattered as well. He kept turning to silence for solace, but maybe the quiet hum of other people’s anonymous lives could have sung him to sleep.

“Couldn’t have kept my dogs here,” he says out loud. Nigel just snorts and takes a vigorous swig from the bottle, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

“This isn’t a permanent fucking situation, Graham,” he says, voice whiskey-shredded.

“It isn’t,” Will says. Their fingers brush as he takes the bottle back, but doesn’t drink yet. “But it’s worse than running in place. We always end up here.” Tilt, swallow, burn.

“‘Here’?”

Will gestures vaguely with the bottle at his face, their closeness. He thinks he can taste blood, the silky iron enhancing the loam of the alcohol. “So—proximate. But so approximate.”

Click, flame. Nigel lights a cigarette and takes a long drag, then proffers it to Will. He watches the ember glow for a second in the hazy dark between them, then accepts it for the first time, exchanging it for the bottle. The filter is plush under his lips, and there’s a slight dampness where Nigel’s lips had been on it first. Will shivers at the thought, but sucks in the smoke, heavy and leaden as he thought it’d be. There’s some facsimile of a cleansing ritual in expelling the smoke, as though every grotesque doubt he’d kept trapped in his lungs was flying out on nicotine wings. “Fuck.”

“Yeah. Fuckin’—keep that one.” Nigel deftly maneuvers, lights another one for himself.

They sit. Time passes. They will stumble back in, eventually, too loud, smiling, maybe not—wrapped up in enough buzz that it doesn’t matter that they fall asleep next to templates of love—but for now, it’s enough to hear the sounds of consumption. The hiss of the paper as Nigel takes another deep inhale off his cigarette, the wavering gurgle of more whiskey down Will’s throat.

Three days. Will has been here for three days, and it’s been nothing but stasis. Not that he’d done anything to change his situation—but he suspects that he’s grown used to following in the wake of Hannibal’s momentum, that things happen _to_ him. Empathy is naturally reactive, after all. His cocoon of inertia. But it feels like he’s been at the DMV for three fucking days, standing in an endless line, and he can feel the impatience blooming between them.

He sneaks a glance at Nigel, but then burns with a flush and stares back down at his knees, gathered at his chest, when he realizes Nigel is looking at him, too. He can feel that Nigel doesn’t avert his gaze, as would be fucking _polite_ , but keeps staring, maybe at the jagged stitches on his cheek, maybe the raised white line of scar on his forehead, maybe at the way his hair curls on the nape of his neck. Maybe all three—cataloguing things he’ll have to live with in his beloved’s stead.

Will can’t bear to run his own inventory. He had killed for the sublime, and he would have his prize.

“Sometimes,” Nigel says.

A cab swerves as someone jaywalks, trotting unapologetically across the unmarked street.

“Sometimes, I feel—arrested.”

Will looks at him then. The cigarette burns, forgotten in his hand.

Nigel continues. “I knew what you meant. Sometimes, the world stops—and I can feel it. Even as other people keep walking and talking and going about their lives, I’m frozen on the same heartbeat. It was like that the first time I saw Adam smile.” He lights another. The butt is still burning on the fire escape. “That’s how I felt the first time I heard my wife—my ex-wife—play.

“The cello. She was—is, I don’t fucking know—a professional cellist. And someone had sliced me open, and I was holding on so I could hear her music. It was—fucking—transcendent.” Nigel lets his head fall back, leaning against the door to the stairs. The tattoo on his neck is black and stark, and he closes his eyes. “I was so fucking awful to her, Will. A fucking— _asshole_. All I knew was that I needed her. Even after I healed, I still only held on for the music of her voice. I didn’t know what was on the other side.

“As it turns out—the other side has New York, and Adam. And now, you, I suppose.” He opens one eye to glare idly at Will. “I can be cruel, and violent and vindictive. And that’s what Adam doesn’t know.”

“Possessiveness,” Will says under his breath. “Imagine that.”

Nigel ignores him. “Her name is Gabi. I don’t know where she is now.”

“I wasn’t great to my wife either,” Will says. There’s a twinge in his chest like the youngest sibling of cardiac arrest. “Molly. I nearly got her killed, all because—”

“Jesus, Graham.” Nigel’s mouth cracks in what could pass for a smile. “Does everyone in your life end up fucked?”

Like he needs the reminder. He’s too drunk to suppress the flinch. “I couldn’t stay away,” he whispers. “It’s my fault—I gave in, I gave up, so completely that I’m no longer the person I was before I left Maine only weeks ago. I warned her. He…changed me.” Dolarhyde’s words are vile in his mouth.

“What did you give in to?”

“I surrendered to Beauty,” Will says. “The exhilaration of living bathed in light. After I tasted—I couldn't go back—”

“Like Adam, and Eve, and their fucking tree.”

“I keep waiting to be driven out of Eden.”

“Maybe you’ve earned your version of paradise.”

Will looks at him. It’s dark and blurry enough to pretend. He leans forward with caution, nestling his head where it had rested on Hannibal’s chest on the cliff-face, soaked in drugs rather than blood. “God, I hope so. I’m so tired.”

“Do you think God is listening?”

“I am paralyzed too often for Him not to be.”

There’s a tentative hand around his shoulders, in his hair. “Every time I asked for God, I got voicemail. But I think he’s going through his inbox now,” Nigel says on a soft smile. “I have Adam. I have a new life. Despite everything—despite _myself_ —I am alive.”

“A new life,” Will slurs. “ _Incipit vita nova._ ”

“All right, come now.” Nigel shifts and it feels like falling all over again, until Nigel’s hands are solid around his waist as they stagger to stand. Will clutches at him for balance, and finally, the outside world has oriented with the interior.

“I’m sorry,” Will says. Nigel’s eyes are black in the moonlight.

“You needn’t be.” A laugh ruffles his hair. “You and Adam, both so clingy when you’re drunk.”

“You didn’t deserve to get tangled up in this. Adam didn’t deserve to— Molly didn’t deserve—”

“ _Puişor mea,_ that’s enough. Even if you felt all the pain in the world, it wouldn’t take away anyone else’s. That’s not how it works.”

“It should,” Will mumbles churlishly against the grand expanse of Nigel’s chest.

“Now we’re just being silly, hmm? Off to bed.”

They barely make it, movements made ineloquent with liquor and emotion, back into the apartment. Will is asleep before his head hits the pillow.

He doesn’t dream.

&

 

The first time Adam cooks under Hannibal’s direction, it’s an unmitigated disaster.

“What is this?”

“Veal.”

“And this?”

“Pork.”

“This looks like a heart.”

“It is a heart.”

Adam squirms, shoulders shifting under his clothes. “I—hm.”

“I understand that they are not common foods, but they are nutritious.”

“Oh…” Adam hefts the heart in his hand, and Hannibal is irritated. It doesn’t do well to handle the meat too much. Adam turns it over, and over, until his hands are stained with the sticky blood, and then he lets go like it’s molten metal and makes a choking, gagging noise. Then he throws up in the sink.

Hannibal wants to roll his eyes.

“Can I—I don’t—I’m sorry—I’m sorry—I’m sorry—” Adam wraps his arms around himself, breath coming in stabs, rocking back and forth at an increasingly rapid pace “I can’t—I’m sorry—” He slides down the kitchen counter to sit as small as possible in front of the oven door, which groans with his movements, rocking back and forth.

Hannibal looks down at him dispassionately. Tears and gasping in a malfunction of the human brain. Will would help. Will would not surrender to the enmity of unfamiliar things. He had seen Will’s hands in motion with a knife, and now he is faced with—this.

All his meat is frozen. Fresh would be better, the blood richer. It would be easy to crouch down, press his left hand against Adam’s neck and feel the give of the trachea as he leaned just so, put all his weight forward.

_I’d do it with my hands._

Slow. Intimate, even. Strangling is reserved for the most personal of deaths, and Hannibal figures it would give Adam the appropriate reverence for daring to wear Will’s face. Not even the sweater fits. And the trembling panic doesn’t belong on Will as Hannibal knows him now, blossomed in bloody moonlight, spattered with the Dragon’s entrails and viciousness alive in his veins.

 _Creak. Creak. Creak._ Back and forth.

He’s never killed to a metronome. Fear and breath are usually enough. He watches Adam’s fragile hands curl and uncurl, stimulation in an attempt at calm. Hannibal steps close and kneels slowly. Yes, he is about an arm’s length away—and arousal comes unhinged inside him, the pleasure of being able to tear into Will’s form with no damage to the original artifact. There would be no inconvenient compassion now—he could indulge, as he is accustomed to, gorging himself on the elegance of the process. It would not be a meal of transformation for the betterment of the pig, but for the worship of them both.

He rests his hand on Adam’s upper arm to calm the lamb before the silence of slaughter. Adam’s face is still burrowed in his arms, and Hannibal tilts his chin up gently. His gaze is striking, forthright and brimming with tears. Words catch in his throat and Hannibal can feel their tremble beneath his fingers, the soft skin of Adam’s throat and the larynx beneath. He could watch the starlight leave Adam’s eyes.

“D-do you have any pasta?”

“ _What_?”

“Do you have any pasta, or—” His breathing is slowing now. It seems, unfortunately, that Hannibal’s touch has helped. His fingers still tread evenly out and in, in a clutch for control. “I can cook. For you. But I need—the texture. It has to be familiar. I’m not opposed to trying new things. But right now, I want—I would _prefer_ —stability.”

Hannibal feels the coldness recede. His fingertips are now sentient also to the gentle nervous swallow of Adam’s throat, the whirring mechanics of compromise, which is so damnably difficult for them both, held out as an offering on Adam’s tongue.

“I’m sorry,” Adam says again.

Hannibal rolls his neck, consciously releases the tension there. Well, I’d _prefer_ fresh meat, he thinks dourly, but says, “I have the ingredients for pasta.”

Adam’s face brightens. “Just tell me what to do! I’m good at following clear instructions. You don’t have to do anything, except just watch to make sure everything is to your preference. I understand that other people like variety in their meals.”

Hannibal is going to need a glass of wine. Maybe two.

Four heady glasses of an excellent Montepulciano d’Abruzzo later, pork is sizzling in the oven, enmeshed in a fragrant bed of garlic and mushrooms and peppercorns. He’s swirling his glass, watching Adam’s brow furrow in concentration as he feeds the dough into the machine. Perhaps he’d underestimated how useful Adam’s predilection for order could be in the kitchen. He’d used a scale to measure out the ingredients. Everything was evenly and carefully spaced in the way that asserted calm in the nervous hum of Hannibal’s mind, almost the way he would have done it himself.

Adam leaves the heart for him to carve, but doles out the pasta neatly, carrying it all to the table, while Hannibal wrestles momentarily with a new bottle of wine, pouring for each of them. The table is set with proper placemats and silverware, and it almost feels like he could be at home in Baltimore. They sit across from each other, and Hannibal cuts a piece of heart so thin it curls onto itself, and offers it to Adam.

“Ah—yes. Thank you.”

He holds it, waiting.

“You want me to—oh.” He stares at the region of Hannibal’s clavicle for a moment, and then leans forward and carefully takes the heart into his mouth.

His teeth are bright and his tongue, the flash of it Hannibal sees, is small and pink. His chewing is audible in the silence, and he blushes when he realizes Hannibal is watching him intently.

“It’s—it’s very different,” he says finally. “But…”

“I can cut you some more, if you like.”

“Will I have to eat it all—like that?”

They make eye contact like candlelight. Hannibal can feel the wine rolling through him, loosening his jaw into an easy smile. “Only if you wish.”

“Oh. Um. No, thank you. I mean—I would like to eat some, just—from my plate.”

He carves three more paper-thin slices for Adam, arranging them neatly one over the other like a spread of playing cards, and then a generous portion for himself and sits heavily, his right arm worn out already.

Hannibal closes his eyes to focus on his first bite of food—the tingle of spice, and the tender fibrous give of meat, and the rush of blood. It floods his mouth and he can’t help the soft noise that escapes his throat.

His first proper food in—years. Alana had let him take liberties in the prison kitchen, occasionally, but this is his own harvest, his own reaping, and it is like the first sunlight after a storm. And he had imagined that he and Will would sit here together and eat, _knowing_ , but Adam’s expression is flat and opaque except for the gentle rose bloom across his face.

“Is it—good? Did I do it correctly?”

“Yes, Adam,” Hannibal says. “Thank you.”

The rose only blooms ruddier than before, and Adam ducks his head. “I’m glad. I’m sorry I—I’ve been trying new things. They’re just…”

Hannibal considers. His hand would fit just as easily across Adam’s neck the way it had fit around Abigail’s to stop the bleeding, but his bloodlust had been sated for the moment. He is long past promises to himself not to allow sentiment; his years with Will, or, more importantly, without, have shed all shame surrounding the instinct to be generous with his heart.

So to speak.

He takes a long sip of wine, dark and silvery on his tongue, a rough bump of a burn as he swallows too quickly.

They eat in silence, but they watch each other. Hannibal wonders what Adam sees of his Nigel as they sit across from each other, what iteration of himself exists for this softer, weaker manifestation of Will. More fragile, closer to the fine bone china that Jack had perceived Will to be. The soft bend of his lip across the curve of the wineglass, the careful way he sips, considers. The soft, clean-shaven jaw making every expression a little more severe in its distress or pleasure—unscarred, telling the story of a life carefully lived.

If this _Nigel_ was anything like Hannibal—how could he stand it? Always treading water, balancing and breathing carefully. Reckless—dangerous, even—to wind him up and watch him go. And not nearly half as fascinating, if the display by the oven was anything to go by.

And yet. Adam has found a way to placate that lion pacing place in his chest, because he isn’t dead, not yet, and Hannibal suspects he will be able to control himself for some time, at least. He has survived worse than this alone—but it’s the _alone_ , not the twisted ligaments or the bullet-wound, that stings in his mind long after the food is gone and much more of the wine with it.

It is with a surprisingly strong hand on his shoulder that Adam keeps Hannibal seated as he clears the plates. “The point of this,” he says, scrubbing fiercely at the gristle accumulated on the roasting pan, “is for you to _rest._ ”

“I have done nothing but rest,” Hannibal grumbles into his wine glass, but stays seated all the same as Adam handles his dishes with appropriate care, his hands almost as pale as the porcelain. It takes the better part of an hour until Adam turns back around, drying his hands.

“I usually try to read in the evenings,” he announces. “Unless you—do you need—?”

“Of course I have books here,” Hannibal sniffs. “And I would not be adverse to it either. There’s a bookcase in the study.”

“Okay.”

Hannibal narrows his eyes in brief thought, and then feigns a grimace and a stumble as he stands up from the table, Adam flying to his side, tea towel still in hand.

“Thank you,” he breathes, and Adam goes a little pink and mumbly as they’re pressed closely side to side.

The lion licks its lips in a languid stretch of teeth.

They hobble along to the study, Hannibal leaning on Adam’s delicate frame far more than necessary; to feel the way those small hands scrabble for purchase and flutter to help. It’s disappointingly easy but strangely warm to feel the evidence of concern.

“Here we are,” he says, and then stands back, expectant. With a nervous look over his shoulder, Adam opens the door and holds it open for him.

Hannibal rolls his neck and listens: he steps just inside the door; waits a moment; then the sound of Adam’s feet in one and a half movements—

His shoulder burns a little when he braces himself against the door after whipping around to slam it shut, the sound explosive. Adam is crowded against and below him, breath warm and quick against Hannibal’s neck.

“W-what are you doing?”

Hannibal bends even closer. “ _Trying new things_ ,” he says, low and dark.

Adam is positively squirming against him, even as they’re aligned hip to shoulder. Stupid boy. But then again—rabbits don’t know what snares feel like—Adam is avoiding eye contact as best he can, as though that will save him even as they are so close that Hannibal can feel the cling of the sweet saliva-damp lower lip against his own. It would take less than a fragment of motion to bring them together, but Hannibal wants Adam to come to him.

He waits.

Adam shifts his hips in an attempt to escape, but it only serves to let Hannibal know what this situation is doing for him. Impatient, he kicks Adam’s feet apart to insinuate a thigh between his legs.

“Go on,” he whispers, like the first lick of flame in tall dry grass.

Adam’s ribcage expands and collapses against his own, once, twice, before he says, “ _No_ ,” and wedges his arms between them to finally push Hannibal away, enough that he can stand without leaning on the door.

“No?”

“No.” Adam closes his eyes briefly. “If that word means anything to you.”

Hannibal draws backs sharply, affronted. “I would _never_ —”

“Okay, good, because even in your condition, I couldn’t fight you off. And I don’t want to.” Adam sighs. “I’m really—I’m not interested.”

“And why not?” Hannibal demands.

“Because as much as you look…and feel it—you aren’t Nigel,” Adam says simply. “You and I don’t share anything but this accident. I don’t understand or trust you, and neither do you me. I’m not yours, and you are certainly not mine. I would think that with the streak of possessiveness clearly running in you both…”

Hannibal stares at him, deliberately trying to elicit discomfort. “So you elect the safe route. Every time.”

“I wouldn’t call Nigel _safe_ , but he is familiar. I know him. And isn’t that what’s important? To you, too?”

“You—”

“Of course,” Adam plows on, “I experience attraction on a physical level alone.” He shifts tellingly, smooths his hands down his thighs. “And I wouldn’t have tried heart for just anyone. I acknowledge that I’m curious as to your differences—scars aside.”

“Have I not accommodated your curiosity, allowed you to taste?”

“Pig’s heart, yes,” Adam says. “But I don’t want to try—human heart. As curious as I am.”

Well. There’s no good response to that if Hannibal wants to keep the uneasy peace.

“You know,” Adam continues, “you don’t have to follow _every_ impulse, Hannibal.”

“Surely that is obvious,” Hannibal says.

“To other people, maybe.”

“ _Pardon_?”

“What’s your favorite book?” Adam says, stepping deftly away from Hannibal’s reach.

He’ll let it go. This once.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> * ** _Incipit vita nova_** \- the inscription in the beginning of La Vita Nuova, Dante's first work. It's probably best described as a collection of poems where he mourns his muse, Beatrice, after her untimely death. Not coincidentally, Beatrice leads Dante through Paradise in the Divine Comedy. Be more subtle, man.  
>  * ** _Puişor mea,_** \- "my chick" (like the baby bird); a Romanian term of endearment.  
>  * **Montepulciano d’Abruzzo** \- a nice, medium- to full-bodied Italian wine, usually consumed young. Nothing like the Batard-Montrachet Bedelia got him in Florence, but this is an _emergency_. What a tool. I mean, I love to hate this guy.


	4. Depression

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for some use of language that could be interpreted as abeleist, and non-consensual voyeurism.

"Your infidelity fills me with care;

It frightens me, and I have come to dread

The lady’s face that often looks on you." 

\- Dante Aligheri, “ _La Vita Nuova_ ”, Chapter XXXVII

 

&

Adam doesn’t come to bed immediately. Hannibal supposes it's understandable—wanting to distance himself from the source of confused desire. But being able to stretch his limbs fully across the bed for the first time in many nights doesn’t feel as relaxing as it ought to.

Despite extensive reading and experience, he’s never quite understood people with insomnia—of course, everyone has restless nights, but that persistent and itchy wakefulness that Will and so many of his patients complained of is foreign to him. Surely it’s enough to lie down and go _inside_ , and sleep when you’re bidden. After all, the main subject of his studies over the past twenty years or so, formal and informal, has been how to tame the unruliness of the human body. And he has been quite successful, considering.

Tonight, however, he is having a little trouble disengaging with the world. He’s not experiencing _trauma_ , or any such ridiculous thing, but closing his eyes reminds him of being underwater. He waits fifteen minutes. Half an hour. The ceiling stays the same. His eyelashes drag against the weight of air. Levitating in the purgatorial state of waiting, like the indefinite prison sentence he had suffered. But even then, it had been tinged with sweetness—the inevitability of setting Will free through being set free. This, however—this was an untenable, itchy sort of anticipation. A well-worn anticipation of calm escape.

It prickles uncomfortably like his youth. Until he’d learned to school his thoughts, guide Mischa to the little door at the end of the hall in the very depths of the basement of his mind (not a dungeon, never a dungeon), sleep had been a miserable ghost—a hollow-socketed ghoul that refused to rest. But since he’d begun his version of art therapy, so to speak, he’d known peace. The daily exertions of muscle and bone ground to a slow halt, and, belly full, pantry overflowing, anxieties sated for the moment, Hannibal found rest. A deep intake of breath. And he finds the strength to go inside.

He dreams, briefly, of Will. The shape of his body is clearly visible in his mind’s eye, floating in the dark. A white outline pressed into the black of the night. Thoughts flowering like antlers from his brain, thin branches unfolding outward, straining to reach the divine. Soaked in fury, anointed with blood. Every gap between his teeth stained with red. Whispers about beauty shattering the post-coital quiet after a kill.

_Did you think you could change me?_

_Haven’t I?_

Not said like a question, but a fatal point of fact. Will had been so certain—even holding his own guts in on Hannibal’s kitchen floor, he’d mustered up the oxygen to tell the truth. Almost calm, placid, like the even steadiness of Bach’s scale exercises. And then—

Eyes glazed over with pain. Revelation sliding down the pale pane of the moon: reality looks black in her light. In the race for understanding he’d come in last and missed the prize. Why run at all? Because Will would run with him. Will had nestled in as the searing asthma of failing endurance, had become the colon constantly blinking between numbers. For all his troubles with clocks he was eternal; for all his troubles with space he was endless.

The sound of rushing water sweeps along the edges of his mind, like a river had turned a sudden corner.

_Wade into the quiet of the stream._

The sound of the rivulets gets harder and harder, like bullets through glass. Shattering shard by shard, a colony of broken butterflies coalescing in reflection. The sound lifts him from sleep gently, like a hollow egg. His eyes open to that peculiar evergreen dark of a room lit by a door left ajar. The water is running in the bathroom.

Hannibal stares at the roughly plastered ceiling for a moment. It’s probably Adam—he can hear a body interrupting the water—but he has to know, he has to know. So he gets up on the pads of tiger’s feet and edges toward the sliver of light. Slowly, articulating each bend of the sole of his foot to the hard cold of the wooden floorboards. The hinges are well-oiled, and so they don’t creak when he nudges the door further open.

It is not, of course, Will. Unblemished, fair, untanned; a hide unworked by dragons and forgiveness. Adam is dipping a generously lathered head of curls under the spray, letting the soap slide down his front in a glycerin froth.

Hannibal watches.

He watches as Adam blindly swipes at the soap on his chest, bangs still wet and heavy in his eyes. He watches as Adam catches a finger on his nipple, hears the punctured balloon hitch of breath, the pink flush through the fog. Adam shakes his hair out of his face (leaving a wet spray on the tile floor, which Hannibal ignores for now), but his eyes stay closed, hands pinching, exploring—leisurely in a way that suggests confidence and comfort that is hard to imagine on Will. He tilts his head back to wade into calm hedonism, drags his fingers through wiry, soap-slick pubic hair to palm his thickening cock with a firm hand.

Hannibal watches.

He is beautiful in his own way, this boy—fresh, strong like the stem of a rose. A conventional, pure beauty that Hannibal is inclined to ignore in favor of the edges of raised scars. Pleasure sings out of his body in the relaxed curve of his spine, the steady sigh as he starts to touch himself in earnest. Most people— _normal_ people—like to pretend that people like Adam are devoid of preferences; it’s complex and dirty to them in a migraine sort of way. Hannibal bites his lip. They’re both abnormal in their own sort of way, but here they are. Surviving, thriving.

Indeed, Hannibal is hard-pressed to imagine anything more sordid than the way Adam deepens the curve of his lower back, spreads his ankles to push back into the shower, uses his other hand to pull his ass open for his hole to be tickled by the invading spray, all the while pulling on his cock.

He teeters between this universe and the next. Desire grips Hannibal in a white-knuckled fist, urging him to shove down his own pants and take his own burgeoning erection in hand. He just blinks instead. It is a pity to have missed even one split-frame second of the lovely pale twist of Adam’s roaming left hand, digging his nails into the flesh of his ass at the swipe of his thumb across the head of his cock, twisting almost viciously at one nipple, then the other. They redden under the attention of his fingers, and his face contorts with scintillation.

The birdcage heaving of his chest as small pants leave his mouth—“Ah, ah, ah—”

The whiplash angle of his head as his hips stutter, two fingers disappearing into the cleft of his ass, his balls draw up as his cock jerks with one arc of dripping come, two. Three. The musky bleach-bright smell stains the air, even through the steam of the shower. Hannibal watches it slide down the drain, mouth wet with want.

The water sounds louder than ever in the aftermath, and even so, he can hear Adam’s plaintive, eyes-tight whisper—“Nigel—”

Hannibal backs into the shadows where he belongs. The hitches of breath of grief and pleasure shouldn’t sound so similar. 

 

&

Will wakes up bleary, invisible hands pushing into the soft give of his temples with the thump of a hangover. He doesn’t recognize where he is, at first, used to waking up now to the black screen of the TV in front of Nigel’s couch—instead he’s looking at sliding closet doors. Come to think of it, there are vague pains in his body that are being soothed by the soft mattress, the warm, even spread of the duvet over his body. His shirt and pants are in a heap by the side of the bed. There’s an imprint of a memory there, papier-mâché hands and a rolling sense of balance in the dark.

The light is harsh against the white of the room, so he closes his eyes again, goes to roll over—when he collides with a heavy mass that jolts his eyes open again.

Rough, slow breath. Skin radiating warmth, a heavy dip in the topography of the bed, tilting Will towards him. Nigel is sleeping next to him, deep in the implacable sleep of an alcoholic haze. Will turns his head minutely, not wanting to disturb Nigel in any case. It occurs to him that he has never watched Hannibal sleep—unconscious, arrested, shot through the gut, sure, but wreathed with blurry morning light, untouched yet by the gracelessness of day? Bangs scattered across his forehead, eyelids gently twitching in the throes of sleep. Of course, Hannibal doesn’t have that prominent scar across his nose (it’s on the arc of his cheekbone instead), and God forbid the rasp of stubble that shadows Nigel’s jaw, even when Hannibal had been in prison. Will studies the divot of his collarbone, the heavy curve of his shoulder in profile. He knows that in order to heft bodies, Hannibal has to be stronger than suits and jumpsuits suggest—yet, the reality of the solid slab of his body, ligaments shifting under skin, under clothes, under blood—

Will turns back over. Those precious few moments where he had allowed himself to feel everything, let every splinter of stimulus needle into his perception. The sky had been silent except for their heaving breath and the ringing echo of his admission. The sticky fibers of Hannibal’s sweater had clung to his blood-soaked sweat-drenched cheek, and he had been surrounded by an inexorable warmth. The nestle of Hannibal’s jaw, the way his fingers clutched at the cloth of Will’s ruined shirt. But most of all, that pitiless heartbeat, thundering against his ear.

Nigel’s breath is a hot whisper on the nape of his neck. Will closes his eyes. That soft brush of air is the most intimate sensation he has experienced in what feels like years. After the easy comfort of waking up next to Molly, easing from wonder to contentment, after watching the seams of the Dragon’s body yield to his knife as Hannibal restrained him—he isn’t in the habit of remembering the absence of touch, but now it aches like a bruise.

Nigel shifts behind him, gets closer, and Will holds a long breath as a tickle of warmth flickers low in his belly. He smells like skin and cigarettes; he is flesh and smoke all at once. Will holds still as a heavy arm is draped over him to pull him close, so he can watch Nigel bend his fingers around his own. The plates of Nigel’s body shift to fit against the curve of his back, the light cling of bodies pressed together like careful flowers between the pages of a dictionary.

Will hovers for a moment, then pushes back, allows himself to be held. The freedom of falling was that it is supposed to be safe to indulge now in beautiful things even though there are voices telling him _no._ So he grows drowsy in Nigel’s greenhouse heat, cradles a scarred hand against his chest.

A frown quirks across his face when Nigel clutches closer, and he can feel—oh. The coarseness of cotton, and underneath that, the unmistakable hardness of an erection.

Well. It’s not like he hasn’t thought about it. Standing under the spray of the shower marveling at how Nigel and Hannibal seem identically different, especially in the dark, a soap-slicked hand sliding along his dick. Imagining himself supine on an altar. The abstract query of what might be expected of him in either world, an offering, a surrender? The logistics alone.

Will isn’t stupid; of course he’s looked it up, clarified in extensive detail how he and Hannibal would have sex. (And then promptly jerked off—something about the crisp, clinical tone; he could hear Hannibal reading it aloud). But the terrible fumbling reality of the situation hasn’t quite hit him until now, with morning wood pressing damp against the small of his back. Will peeks under the duvet for a second, just to make sure they both still have underwear on, then flips it back down in relief. He wants to laugh suddenly, his apprehension looming but recognizably silly, young, almost. Easily falling into the cliché of _like a kid on prom night._

Nonetheless, he can’t help but hitch a breath when Nigel shifts, puts his lips to the first lump of vertebrae on the slope of Will’s back, tangles their legs together. An agonizingly slow roll of the hips, which Will waits out like the breathless peak of a rollercoaster, and the low rumble of his voice when he says, “Morning, gorgeous,” into the shell of Will’s ear.

 _He thinks I’m Adam._ The rollercoaster plummets, and Will takes a second to observe his own disappointment. He hadn’t anticipated the low sinking feeling, the anchor weight of regret when he realizes that Nigel is acting out of habit. Suppose he’s gotten used to the obscene passion that Hannibal harbors for him? He takes another second to contemplate that thought, decides there isn’t enough therapy in the world, and so opens his eyes. What, exactly, is the etiquette for a situation like this? Do you just politely push his dick away from your ass? Apologize for having accidentally switched places with his lookalike husband?

Jesus. He can feel Nigel’s teeth on his spine, the lazy rut against the articulated cleft of his ass in Adam’s too-tight briefs. His nerves come alive like Christmas lights, cock swelling with the repeated press of Nigel’s erection. It’s so unmistakably sexual and charged with want that he finds himself reacting—lips parting for hard-earned breath, the involuntary jerk of his hips when their joined hands scrape across a nipple, tight and sensitive with arousal. There is no protocol for this. He has no choice but to leave the sweet embrace of illusion.

“Nigel,” he tries. Nigel’s hands only disentangle themselves to wander, tracing the bracing tilt of his ribs, the orbit of his waist. His fingers descend. Will clears his throat—

But before he can say anything, Nigel reaches the scar, raised and low on his abdomen. Will can almost smell the revelation, it’s so apparent in the way every joint in the body behind him stiffens with lightning recognition. He rolls away first so he doesn’t have to feel Nigel’s revulsion.

“Sorry,” he says to the ceiling.

Nigel grunts at him. They lie there, catching their breath, staring resolutely away from each other, willing arousal to fade. He doesn’t even risk a look askance, knowing that they’ll snag, a hook-and-eye closure. The telltale click of the lighter. Will scowls but doesn’t turn, refusing the broach the canyon of silence. Tendrils of smoke start to invade his side of the ceiling.

“You ever do it?”

“What—?”

“You ever fuck him,” Nigel clarifies, angling his head toward Will, cigarette dangling from his mouth.

“No.”

“He fuck you?”

“ _No._ ”

“Christ. I’d throw myself off a cliff too.”

Will bristles. “Not—not because I didn’t want to,” he says before he can stop himself.

“Oh?” Nigel laughs, a dark charcoal smear of a thing. “What did you want?”

“Fucking. Be fucked. I don’t know, it’s—”

“The first few times are weird.”

“What?” Will has to look at him then, a narrow-eyed glare. “What are you trying to say?”

Nigel shrugs, one-shouldered. “I’m saying that you’re used to fucking women. It’s different.”

Will laughs. “I’m not expecting it to be the same. I did Biology 101.”

“It’s fucking different when you’re in love.”

That shuts Will up for a second, before he takes a deep breath and plows on: “ _Making love_ isn’t something I’ve done outside of a thesaurus.”

“You love him.” Nigel tosses the cigarette butt into a mug on the bedside table. It sizzles out in the cold instant coffee inside. “You’re in love with a man. Not a lot you can do about it. Might as well figure it out.”

“Not a lot to figure out. Insert tab A into slot B. Feel like I’ve got it down.”

Nigel sits up and leans over to rummage in his night-side table drawer, then tosses something to Will. A heavy plastic tube smacks into his chest.

“ _Lube_?” Will blinks at the tube in his hand. “What’re you saying, that I should—I should practice?”

“Suit yourself. Just helps if you figure it out beforehand.” His tone is dismissive, but he’s turned to Will, watching him with a reminiscent focus. Eyes dark, air dense with winding him up and watching him go. Deep, sweeping shadow in the heavy way he looks upon what is laid out in front of him. Identically different.

Will pops the cap before he can think too hard. Pushes his underwear to his knees with some help from his left hand, careful to stay underneath the covers, smears a generous amount of lube on his right index and middle fingers. It’s thick and cold. He draws his knees up so his feet are flat on the bed and reaches between his legs, brow lined with concentration.

It’s not so much that he has difficulty finding his asshole as it is that he’s never really thought about its location. He has to turn his wrist at a difficult angle to brush the pads of his fingers across his hole. “Motherfucker.”

This would be a good opportunity for Nigel to gloat, but he says nothing. Will can feel the burning gaze acutely, closes his eyes against it and just hitches his right leg up a little higher. It’s sensitive and warm against the tips of his fingers when he reaches down again, exploring. Every sensation seems to shoot straight up his spine to tingle at the back of his neck, as he presses his index finger firmly against his hole. He pushes in and has to remind himself to breathe, even, slow. Relax. He makes slow, burning progress, pushing relentlessly until his finger is fully seated inside him.

He opens his eyes. “Weird,” he confirms.

Nigel smiles at him. “Keep going.”

Will moves his finger experimentally. It’s an odd sensation—the simultaneous but distinct clutch of his ass, and the feeling of being inside. He has to pull his leg higher up work the tip of his middle finger inside. Clenches his jaw against the sting. It’s a kind of pain that he’s never had to handle before, and he nearly has to smile at that—enduring new pains for Hannibal is nothing new. Something melts, he figures out how to relax a little further, his right knee is almost to his chest and there’s a strain in his shoulder, and he wiggles his middle finger in to be wedged tight alongside. He withdraws a little, and pushes back in—a gasp leaves his mouth and his eyes fly open.

“How deep are you?” Nigel’s voice is low and rolls like distant thunder.

“Two fingers,” he pants, “all the way in.” He pumps his hand in shallow thrusts, as far as his wrist will allow. “Fuck.”

Frankly, it’s uncomfortable and difficult to focus, a carefully choreographed set of levers. The smallest movement is magnified a thousand times, jolting feeling—whether it’s pain or pleasure is to be determined—up through his body. But the idea: his fingers dragging along his insides, stretching his ass open so he can be fucked, so Hannibal can fuck him, be inside him in a way nobody has been before. The idea alone is enough to leave him ragged, biting into his chapped bottom lip. He looks at Nigel through half-lidded eyes, letting the fragments inform his imagination—the angles of the cheekbones, the elegance in the neck and forearms, the stormcloud expression, like he wants to consume. To devour. The mattress dips under Nigel’s weight as he shifts to sit up, to kneel and lean over Will.

“What—”

Nigel rips the covers off him, exposing him to light and air.

“What the fuck—”

Nigel is hovering over him, built as golden and thick and corded as the first day they met, hard cock jutting a prominent bulge into the front of his boxers. He reaches for Will’s hand, and Will has the horrible, thrilling thought that he’s going to pull it out and replace it with his cock, but he merely adjusts the angle of Will’s wrist. “Can you feel it?”

“Feel what?”

“There should be a spot—bend your fingers in—”

 _Prostate gland_ , Hannibal’s voice helpfully supplies.

“You’ll know when you find it,” Nigel says in a more crudely-hewn version of the slip-silk accent he knows so well.

Will crooks his fingers in, twists, and then— “Fuck!” It’s a camera bulb flash of pleasure behind his eyes, a white-hot two-punch in the gut and diaphragm that feels so good.

Nigel flashes that crooked-tooth grin at him, pats his thigh. “It’ll be easier if you turn over,” he says. “On your knees.”

“Oh my God,” Will mumbles, but gingerly extracts his hand and kicks at his underwear until it’s tangled around an ankle, gets on his elbows and knees. Nigel impatiently swats at the inside of his thighs to get him to spread wider, and it feels vulnerable and filthy. Then Nigel takes the lube and squirts so much on Will’s hole he can feel it trickling cold down the back of his balls and he jerks forward reflexively. “ _Jesus_. Warn a guy.”

Nigel just lies back down with a ridiculous smirk on his face and Will wants to roll his eyes. Instead, he presses his face to his forearm and reaches back to finger himself again, probing gently against tender skin. The slide is, begrudgingly, easier this time, and he angles for his prostate gland. His face goes slack with pleasure. _Got it in one, Graham_ , he thinks idly to himself as he rocks his fingers back and forth. The pull of his fingers against the rim of his hole also elicits sharp, wonderful sparks, but the vibrant shock of his prostate has him shoving back on his hand and his cock dripping onto the sheets, punching a loud moan out of his lungs. Nigel is watching him with hawk-black eyes and has a hand down the front of his boxers, and he sees himself reflected in Nigel’s gaze—mouth wet and open, ass dripping with lube, letting every wanton sound loose, legs spread wide—their thoughts collide.

“You don’t need—tell me to be quiet,” he gasps, “and I will. If I don’t sound—right, if I don’t sound like—” He can feel the wound healing on the inside of his cheek. Nigel doesn’t say anything. Will can see the slick head of his cock glistening as he jerks himself off, almost brutal, and continues, “I didn’t mean—don’t look—my scars—”

“Shut up,” Nigel says from between gritted teeth. “I want to watch you come.” And if that doesn’t go straight to his dick, so Will lowers himself onto his chest and fucks into his left hand, every movement _in_ pitching him forward. The moment of orgasm sneaks up on him, a sudden blushing fever flooding his face and his chest, wringing his lungs of a shout and a few final vicious stutters of his fingers taking him over the edge. He comes hard, hand tight on his cock and fingers deep in his ass; eyes screwed shut.

His muscles scream as he lowers himself slowly onto the bed, narrowly avoiding the wet astringent stain of his come, pulling his hand out to rest beside him. “Fuck,” he says, voice rough. “Fuck, that was good.” Nigel has his upper lip clamped between his jagged teeth, hand making obscene noises on his dick—he lets loose a hoarse noise at Will’s words. “You liked watching me?” Will continues into the white space between them. “Fucking myself for the first time.”

“Fuck, yes.” Nigel’s abdomen jumps and flexes, and he slides his free hand into his own hair and pulls so his throat is exposed. He shudders as he comes, spurting fluid and hot onto his stomach, then sags against the headboard, sinking into the pillows. Their gulping breaths resonate like gunshots in an arena.

Nigel isn’t looking at him. “I’m going to—clean up,” Will says finally, and maneuvers stiff limbs out of the bed, pushing the door to the bathroom open with his elbow. He lets the shower run lukewarm, then steps under the spray, scrubbing his hands vigorously first, then letting water run down his front, his back. He has to bend forward, bracing himself against the wall to feel like he’s really clean. He doesn't linger on his reflection when he towels off, a force of habit—avoids the even newer knots of shiny pink skin on his shoulder and face.

He stands at the side of the bed, avoiding eye contact with the wet spot. Between it and Nigel—still naked, stretched out languorously—it’s hard to settle his eyes anywhere.

“You know when you’ve really hit middle age?” he says, staring at the corner of his pillowcase.

Nigel grunts.

“When your biggest fear is falling over in the shower.”

Nigel turns to look at him, blank, incredulous. And then he starts to laugh. Shaking, full-throated, backlit by morning light, and Will can only watch before a smile starts to catch on the corners of his mouth. For all his imagination has extended his horizon to imagine Hannibal cutting him, killing him, kissing him, he has never once thought what it might be like to share a temperate moment like this. Will slides onto the bed, towel secured firmly around his waist. Nigel pulls the sheets back up and leans like a willow, long body arching gently toward Will.

“I wonder—” Will’s voice halts and swerves like a car in a near-accident.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

Nigel lights a cigarette in response, takes a deep drag.

“Aren’t there smoke detectors in here?”

He lets out a vaguely irritated plume of smoke. “Relax, Graham.”

“I’m not—” Will stops again, watches gray curls of smoke float adrift. “I wonder—”

Ever patient, Nigel outwaits him with the burning of ash to keep him silent company.

“I wonder if I’ll be able to laugh with him. Like this. In bed,” Will says, and immediately wants to burrow under the covers and never come out, hackles rising at the flare of vulnerability in his chest.

But Nigel just says, “Fuck if I don’t hope so.”

And Will hums his contentment with ambiguity and goes back to sleep.

 

&

Hannibal goes back to bed and waits, feigning sleep as Adam dresses and sleeps in the other bed. He waits until dawn brushes the horizon with her watery inks before he gets up to lock himself in the bathroom. The tile looks quiet in the shroud of morning, and his sigh is amplified in porcelain as he finally leans back on the door, pushes his pants down to his knees, takes his rigid cock in hand. For a brief moment, he considers taking his time with this, extracting pleasure drop by drop. But the soft shuffle of his skin on skin is enough to remind him of the plaintive shameless way Adam had arched and breathed out in the shower, just across from where he stands now, and he can’t help himself.

He spits into his palm. It’s unrefined, but people forget that they are animals first. Images flash behind the dark dome of his eyelids. The magenta crescents of blunt nails against soft skin. The glaze of semen on the head of Adam’s cock. The plush open space of his mouth. Hannibal grits his teeth and hears the whisper of someone else’s name off of a foreigner’s lips—wants at the want, throbs with the idea of such profound need. He swallows to fill the hollow of his throat as body parts begin their steady rotation across the reel of his mind. The corners of Will’s mouth, pulled in a startled laugh. The weather-rough backs of his hands. The flash of blood between white teeth. The resistance of Will’s abdomen against his own before they fell, resistance against the blade of a linoleum knife. The rich spill of their mixed blood and breath on the ever-eroding bluff—they were so close—he’s so close—the cliff takes him over orgasm.

He spills into the cautious cup of his large hand, and finally slumps against the door.

Perhaps he can be content, just like this, the doorknob driving relentless brass into the small of his back, sagging from completion but dissatisfaction at its own peak. Perhaps he was never meant to have everything—he is a king of illusions, after all, a master of dreams.

 _But_ , he thinks to himself, _I wish I could have seen his face. One last time._


End file.
